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Immigration Facts
For a strong American economy, immigrants are one essential factor. They fill a major work force shortage, from pizza delivery boys to Microsoft programmers to NASA researchers. The forecast for 2025 is grim: a shortage of more than 20 million workers. And this gap can be filled only with legal immigrants. The other options are not so blissful: illegal immigrants or a weaker economy. The shortage of workers will only lead to inflation and economy problems.
Every day, nearly 70,000 foreigners arrive in the United States. More than 60,000 of them are just travelers, students or businessmen, around 5,000 are illegal immigrants and only 2,000 (3 percent) are legal immigrants.
Historically, the main source of U.S. immigrants was Europe, followed shortly by Canada. This situation lasted until the end of the 20th century when a major shift occurred. The United States was simply assaulted by legal and mostly illegal immigrants from Latin America. They now account for more than 50 percent of the foreign-born population, while Europe only accounts for about 15 percent and Canada for 7 percent.
Foreign-born people now represent more than 10 percent of the United States population, and most of them are concentrated in only 8 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. New York City alone has more than 15 percent of the total U.S. immigrant population.
Fortunately, new legal immigrants are more educated, reaching the point where the percentage of them with a bachelors or postgraduate degree is much higher than that of the local work force. One result of this fact is that at least the first two generations of legal immigrants have unusually high results in school, winning a great amount of scholastic prizes.
One myth is that immigrants are the cause of native unemployment. Not true. In 2006, 10 companies started by immigrants earned more than $50 billion in revenues and provided a huge number of jobs.
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