Giving Compass' Take:

• Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova detail how immigration demographics in the United States have changed over the past four decades.

• Immigrants are less likely to come from Mexico than they used to be, and more likely to come from Asia, Africa, and Central America. How can immigrants' rights advocates use this knowledge to inform their outreach?

• Learn how one town is embracing immigrant students in its schools.

While the immigrant population in the United States continued its moderate growth in 2017, and the foreign-born share of the overall U.S. population reached a near-historic high of 14 percent, other noteworthy trends were underway beneath these totals. Compared to the 1980­–2010 period, the national origins of new arrivals have shifted. Recent newcomers are more likely to come from Asia, Central America, and Africa, and less likely to be from Mexico. Research also shows that new immigrants tend to have higher educational attainment than those who arrived in prior periods. These changes will have a significant impact on the demographics and future integration outcomes of the country’s immigrant population.

Between 2010 and 2017, the foreign-born population in the United States increased by 4.6 million, or 11 percent, driven in large part by the arrival of Indian and Chinese immigrants. Immigration from the Caribbean (the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti); Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala); South America (Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil); Asia (the Philippines, Vietnam, and Bangladesh); and Africa (Nigeria) also experienced sizable growth during this period. Together, these 15 countries, shown in Table 1, accounted for 37 percent of the 44.5 million immigrants living in the United States in 2017, and for 76 percent of the immigrant population growth from 2010 to 2017. On the flip side, there are 441,000 fewer Mexican immigrants in the United States today than there were in 2010, the biggest decline of all immigrant groups.

Read the full article about immigrants by Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova at Migration Policy Institute.