Immigration security

Why We Panic about Immigration

...To start with, no matter what some people tell you, the impact of immigration isn’t all myth. Ground-level reality offers one reason why the issue has climbed in importance over the past decade. America today is home to more than 44 million immigrants, the largest immigrant population in the world and almost a quarter of the world’s immigrants. Nearly a fourth of those are illegal immigrants, who tripled as a share of the immigrant population between 1990 and 2007. That feeds popular sentiment that border crossings are out of control, even though the illegal-alien population has actually declined by nearly 20 percent over the past decade. Mexican immigration fell off so far as to be outnumbered by Mexicans returning home. While about a quarter of the foreign-born population still hails from Mexico, Asian immigrants have outnumbered Hispanic immigrants every year since 2010.

What remains is less a wave of new arrivals than a pool of foreign-born residents. Some 13.7 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, nearly triple the share in 1970 and approaching the all-time high of 14.8 percent in the 1890s. The last time that figure was this high was the 1920s, when Congress last sharply restricted immigration after the First World War. In 1970, New York was the only state where immigrants were more than 9 percent of the population; today, immigrants are 27.2 percent of California’s people and more than 20 percent of New York’s, New Jersey’s, and Florida’s.