Asians Projected to Outnumber Hispanics as Largest Immigrant Group, Study finds

Meanwhile, the share of new arrivals who are Hispanic is smaller than it was 50 years ago.

There’s a lot of data to digest in this Pew survey of immigration trends that was published today.

“The big picture is that immigration has been the major demographic factor driving growth and change in the USA population over the last 50 years”, Pew demographer and co-author of the report Jeff Passel told Reuters. It abolished a quota system that had favored immigrants from Europe and replaced it with a system emphasizing family reunification and skilled immigrants. This means that 51 percent of population boom was linked to immigrants. With Mexicans accounting for only 15 per cent of all new immigrants in 2013, the Pew report found, the share of newcomers who are Latino is at its lowest level in five decades. It doesn’t look like that’s going to change. Unlike the Latino population, which mostly shares a common language, Spanish, and many cultural traits, the census category of Asian takes in a vast array of ethnic and language groups, including Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indians and Pakistanis.

The attitude survey was conducted about two months before GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump drew worldwide attention with his comments in June that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us”.

Since then, about 59 million immigrants have come to the United States.

Asian Americans now fill about 6% of America’s population from occupying 1% in 1965. “In 1965, 84% of Americans were non-Hispanic whites”.

This was confirmed by Pew’s director of Hispanic research Mark Hugo Lopez.

By 2065, Hispanics are expected to make up 31 percent of immigrants.

Today, the nation is 62% white, 18% Hispanic, 12% black and 6% Asian.

For the past half-century, these modern-era immigrants and their descendants have accounted for just over half the nations population growth and have reshaped its racial and ethnic composition, it says.

“Hispanic population growth is coming from people born here in the United States,” not new immigrants, López explained. They added 72 million people to the nations population as it grew from 193 million in 1965 to 324 million in 2015. Hispanics and Middle Easterners, however, were not viewed as favorably by numerous respondents. “But today, more Americans believe immigration is a strength rather than a burden”. The main concerns regarding immigration appeared to be crime and economy, with roughly half of Americans saying immigrants have had a negative impact on both.

Under his plan, American-born children of immigrants would be deported with their parents, and Mexico would be asked to help build a wall along the US-Mexico border. Only 11 percent see Asians negatively, and just 9 percent see Europeans that way.

The attitudes toward immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East were similar, the survey found, within a few percentage points – almost 40 percent said the effect of those immigrants was negative.