Resource of the Week: Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States
By Kirin K. Kalia, Editor, Migration Information Source, Migration Policy Institute

Our just-published article, Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States, covers everything from Mexican immigrants to health-care coverage to government budgets and backlogs. A few interesting numbers:

• Of the 46.9 million people in 2008 who identified themselves as having Hispanic or Latino ancestry, nearly two-thirds (62.0 percent) were native-born US citizens. The remaining 38.0 percent were immigrants.
• Immigrants, who in 2008 made up 12.5 percent of the US population, accounted for 29 percent of the 46.6 million working-age adults and children under 18 with no health insurance in 2008.
• According to a Mexican survey, 14.2 percent of Mexican migrants who headed toward the United States in 2008 came from the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico.
• Funding for the US Border Patrol increased 519 percent between 1986 and 2002, from $268 million to $1.6 billion. The Border Patrol budget was more than $3.5 billion in 2008, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
• In 2008, there were about 16.3 million children age 17 and under with at least one immigrant parent. They accounted for 23.2 percent of the 70 million children age 17 and under in the United States.

This article is available on the Migration Information Source, an online journal of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. that studies immigration issues, trends, and policies in the United States and around the world. The MPI Data Hub provides instant access to the latest immigration statistics, maps, and numbers for the United States and other countries. For US state-level immigration data, see the ACS and Census Data Tool.

Also, if this is a subject area of interest to you, be sure to sign up for the free twice-monthly Migration Information Source email newsletter, which offers interesting, smartly packaged articles and data on immigration-related developments in the United States and around the world.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 and is filed under Fast Facts, Reference Tools, Resource of the Week, Source File, Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.