Where do migrants to the US come from?

Immigration to the US has increased significantly in the last 100 years. The U.S had the largest immigrant population in the world in 2019. The United States’ foreign-born population increased by 5 percent from 2015 to 2019, reaching nearly 51 million people. The most significant aspect of the current US immigration trends in the composition of the immigrants.

The largest migrant population in the United States are people from either Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean. The largest migrant population belongs to Mexico with over 11 million Mexican-born migrants living in the US. The next largest migration population comes from Asia including China, India and the Philippines.

The United States’ foreign-born population increased by 5 percent from 2015 to 2019, reaching nearly 51 million people. As of 2019, Mexican-born migrants were still by far the largest foreign-born population living in the United States, at just over 12.4 million, accounting for around 22.7 percent of the total number of immigrants in the United States.

The second-largest group of the migrant population is from Asia particularly India, China and the Philippines. Another major percentage of the migrant population belongs to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba and El Salvador.

Migrants from China form the second largest number of immigrants to the United States, and migrants from Asia are projected to become the largest contributors to the migrant population by 2055. At present migrants from Asia arrive either through family-sponsored visas or as students.

The factors that influence the composition of migrants in the US population include changes in U.S. immigration and refugee laws, U.S. economic and military presence in the migrant source countries, and economic changes and political instability in these countries.

Today the population of immigrants from the US is spread across the country. It had been concentrated in only a few US states in the past. The U.S.-born overseas population has grown and expanded over the last few decades. This has led to population growth in many states and reversed the decline in some others.

However, the inflow of immigrants in the US has decreased ever since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic due to the travel restrictions.