By Daniel Nardini
Immigration in this decade is in many ways a continuation of trends in the previous decades, and in other ways a result of conditions in the countries immigrants are coming from. There are and have been within recent years reasons why immigrants from the countries I will list below are coming to the United States; having family and relatives already living in this country, leaving poverty and/or political repression behind, coming to America to start a new life and/or businesses, buying real estate, immigrating here due to job offers, attending an American university, etc. Immigration today does no resemble what it was in the decades previous in the 20th Century and certainly is nothing like what it was over a century ago when mostly European immigrants came to the United States. Those days are gone. Just as equally true is the fact that almost all of the immigration is going to the coastal states. Immigration is not as evenly spread out throughout the country the way it once was. But then, this trend also reflects the pattern of Americans moving within the United States. Americans go where the jobs and opportunities are. Immigrants simply follow this trend.
The countries where most immigrants come from these days are from the Americas and Asia. From the Americas immigrants primarily come from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Jamaica, and Mexico. From Asia they primarily come from China, India, Japan (that one surprised me. Mostly, the Japanese immigrants go to Hawaii where there are already pretty well established Japanese communities) and the Philippines. There is only one European immigrant group that still comes to the United States in any substantial numbers, and they are the Polish from Poland. The top ten U.S. states which receive the lion’s share of immigrants these days are California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. As I said before, with the exception of the inland state of Nevada, the U.S. coastal states are seeing the lion’s share of the arriving immigrant population. In this case I am talking of legal immigrants—those who went through the long and laborious process to get to America. To give an example I personally know, a business owner of a Chinese restaurant near where I live brought over his wife and children after eight years of going through the immigration process. Despite the hurdles so many immigrants must jump through (which I also went through to bring my wife to the United States), they will still do it.
It seems in too many ways the whole immigration process has a built-in mechanism where only those willing to stick it out and go through too much bureaucratic red tape are the ones who seem to be rewarded with being let into the country these days. Unless something drastically changes, this is the immigration trend for the foreseeable future. Immigration in the early 21st Century is quite different from what it was, and it means that the offspring of these new immigration groups will make the United States a more diverse, and in so many ways a more equitable country racially, ethnically, in terms of religion, and from any and all walks of life from everywhere around the world. For those immigrants who have come to this country to make a new life for themselves, they should be welcomed with open arms!
Immigration to the United States in the 2020’s
By Daniel Nardini
The countries where most immigrants come from these days are from the Americas and Asia. From the Americas immigrants primarily come from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Jamaica, and Mexico. From Asia they primarily come from China, India, Japan (that one surprised me. Mostly, the Japanese immigrants go to Hawaii where there are already pretty well established Japanese communities) and the Philippines. There is only one European immigrant group that still comes to the United States in any substantial numbers, and they are the Polish from Poland. The top ten U.S. states which receive the lion’s share of immigrants these days are California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. As I said before, with the exception of the inland state of Nevada, the U.S. coastal states are seeing the lion’s share of the arriving immigrant population. In this case I am talking of legal immigrants—those who went through the long and laborious process to get to America. To give an example I personally know, a business owner of a Chinese restaurant near where I live brought over his wife and children after eight years of going through the immigration process. Despite the hurdles so many immigrants must jump through (which I also went through to bring my wife to the United States), they will still do it.
It seems in too many ways the whole immigration process has a built-in mechanism where only those willing to stick it out and go through too much bureaucratic red tape are the ones who seem to be rewarded with being let into the country these days. Unless something drastically changes, this is the immigration trend for the foreseeable future. Immigration in the early 21st Century is quite different from what it was, and it means that the offspring of these new immigration groups will make the United States a more diverse, and in so many ways a more equitable country racially, ethnically, in terms of religion, and from any and all walks of life from everywhere around the world. For those immigrants who have come to this country to make a new life for themselves, they should be welcomed with open arms!