One-in-Five U.S. Residents Either Foreign-Born or First Generation.

The number of foreign-born and first-generation U.S. residents has reached the highest level in U.S. history, 56 million, or a ratio of 1-in-5, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau.

“And the number of foreign-born and first-generation residents is likely to rise in the future as recent immigrants form families,” said Dianne Schmidley, author of Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000 “One indication of this is the fact that births to foreign-born women now account for 1-in-5 births in the United States,
which is up from about 1-in-20 three decades ago.”

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http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-206.pdf

The number of people in 2000 who either were foreign-born themselves or who had at least one foreign-born parent grew from 34 million in 1970 primarily because of the tripling of the foreign-born population over the same 30-year period. The foreign-born population alone was estimated at 28 million, or 1-in-10 U.S. residents, in 2000.

As a result of the high levels of international migration of young adults to the United States during the period 1970-2000, the foreign-born and first-generation population has become not only larger, but also younger. As a result, 21 percent of the nation’s population under age 25 in 2000 was either foreign-born or first-generation, up from only 7 percent in 1970.

The report, which is accompanied by a set of detailed tables, presents the first-ever Census Bureau analysis of the characteristics of children who live with foreign-born parents.

“Contrary to popular belief,” said Schmidley, “most children who live with foreign-born parents were born in the United States and not abroad.” Indeed, among the 11.5 million children who lived with foreign-born householders in 2000, about 8-in-10 were born in the United States.

Other highlights of the report:

– Although the survey sample was not large enough to rank most countries with complete accuracy, Latin America and Asia probably accounted for as many as nine of the 10 leading countries of birth for the U.S. foreign-born in 2000. (See charts 1a-1d.) Mexico alone accounted for more than one-quarter of this population.

– A ratio of 7-in-10 foreign-born people lived in the six states having a foreign-born population of 1 million or more. These ranged from 8.8 million in California to 1.2 million each in New Jersey and Illinois. More than 3-in-10 foreign-born people lived in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas alone.

– The 1999 median income of households with a foreign-born householder ranged from a low of $29,388 for those where the householder was born in Latin America to a high of $51,363 for those whose householders were born in Asia.

– The median duration of residence in the United States for the foreign-born population was 25 years for those from Europe and 14 years each for those from Asia and those from Latin America.

– Average household size for foreign-born households ranged from a high of 3.7 persons for those with Latin American householders to a low of about 2.3 persons for those with householders from Canada and Europe.

– Among foreign-born people who were 25 or older, high-school completion rates ranged from a low of 34 percent for those from Mexico to a high of 95 percent for those from Africa.

– While more than 6-in-10 householders from Europe owned their homes, just over 4-in-10 from Latin America did so.