Thursday, December 15, 2005

Immigration explosion

Read in the news yesterday that, more than one in ten people from the current USA population are Foreign Born, in numbers this is a figure of 35.2 million or 12.1% as of March 2005. This is the highest number of immigrants ever recorded in the USA, and this is not including the million's of Illegal immigrants. Of this figure 1.8 million's are South Asians, with Indians being 1.411 million. Mexico provides the higherst number of immigrants at 11 million followed by east asia, south asia, and vietnam.

Statistics show that as far as India is concerned, the period 2000 to 2005 showed a sharp upswing in the number of immigrants at nearly 4,60,000 for the five year period. If this is the figure inspite of stringent immigration requirements post 9/11, decrease in skilled workers visa, the scores of student visa rejects that we saw in India, and a lot of outsourcing; wonder how much this figure would be inflated otherwise.

Would also be interesting to know how many of the US born population are second generation immigrants.