It’s a kind of statistic that the US wouldn’t be proud of. Three years ago, over 40 million people living in the US were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants.
Recent numbers further confirm an unsettling reality. The US Census Board claimed that legal and illegal immigrants comprised 13.9 % of the US population of 33-odd crore, as of July 2022, as opposed to 13.6% the previous year.
This means that one out of seven US residents is foreign-born, reported a national newspaper, citing a term mentioned in the report. It added that Indian and Chinese immigrants comprised 6% each of the total immigration count last year. Mexicans topped the list at 106.8 lakh, which is equivalent to 23% of the immigrant population, although the data recorded a 1% drop compared to the previous year.
The number of Indians, according to the 2022 census, was 28.4 lakh, as against 27.09 lakh the previous year, an increase of 4.8%.
The Center for Immigration Studies claimed that the figure of foreign-borns of 4.61 crore is the largest that the ACS has ever recorded. Ten years ago, this number was 4.08 crore.
Responding to concerns over the growing number of immigrants, David J Bier, associate director of immigration studies at Cato Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, said in a post that “the immigrant share of the US population rose just 0.3 percentage points from 13.6% to 13.9% from July 2021 to July 2022.”
Contrary to what the numbers suggest, Bier believes the portion of immigrants in the US is now the lowest ever.
To accentuate this point, the daily highlights that immigrants were 13.1%
of the US population in 2012, which is up by just 0.7 percentage points. Bier pointed out that the growth in the immigrant share has dropped by 76% since the 1990s.
Bier concluded, “America needs people in both the short and long term, and it needs workers of all skill types. Immigrants can help, and they should be allowed to do so legally.”
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