Why does people come to america

The number of naturalization applications has climbed in recent years, though the annual totals remain below the 1. Generally, most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply to become citizens.

However, Mexican lawful immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate overall. Language and personal barriers, lack of interest and financial barriers are among the top reasons for choosing not to naturalize cited by Mexican-born green card holders, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Mexico is the top origin country of the U. In , roughly More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U. In , the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.

By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years. Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U. New immigrant arrivals have fallen, mainly due to a decrease in the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the U.

The drop in the unauthorized immigrant population can primarily be attributed to more Mexican immigrants leaving the U. In addition to new arrivals, U. In , the percentage of women giving birth in the past year was higher among immigrants 7.

While U. Since the creation of the federal Refugee Resettlement Program in , about 3 million refugees have been resettled in the U. In fiscal , a total of 30, refugees were resettled in the U. Texas, Washington, New York and California resettled more than a quarter of all refugees admitted in fiscal California had the largest immigrant population of any state in , at Texas, Florida and New York had more than 4 million immigrants each.

Related Articles View All. Refugees, asylum and green cards: A look at the latest immigration data from the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration is down and so are births: Why population growth slowed down. Immigration demographics: A look at the native and foreign-born populations. The path to citizenship in the United States. The naturalization process: Explained.

Related Data View All. Green cards granted 1. Explore the data. Naturalizations granted , Newsletter Data delivered to your inbox Keep up with the latest data and most popular content. Email Address. This is up from about million adults between and Gallup's Global Emotions Report quantifies how the world is feeling. Notice: JavaScript is not enabled. Please Enable JavaScript Safely.

Gallup Blog. Top Desired Destinations for Potential Migrants. Survey Methods Results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with nearly , adults, aged 15 and older, in countries from to Gallup World Poll questions: Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?

Sign Up. In recent years the focus of the civil rights debate has shifted. With antidiscrimination laws in effect and blacks moving steadily into the middle class, the question has become whether or not the effects of past discrimination require the government to take certain remedial steps.

Called "affirmative action," these steps may include hiring a certain number of blacks or members of other minorities in the workplace, admitting a certain number of minority students to a school, or drawing the boundaries of a congressional district so as to make the election of a minority representative more likely.

The public debate over the need, effectiveness, and fairness of such programs became more intense in the s. In any case, perhaps the greatest change in the past few decades has been in the attitudes of America's white citizens.

More than a generation has come of age since King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Younger Americans in particular exhibit a new respect for all races, and there is an increasing acceptance of blacks by whites in all walks of life and social situations. In fewer than 4 million U. Today that number is about 27 million. About 50 percent of Hispanics in the United States have origins in Mexico. The other 50 percent come from a variety of countries, including El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia.

Thirty-six percent of the Hispanics in the United States live in California. Several other states have large Hispanic populations, including Texas, New York, Illinois, and Florida, where hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the Castro regime have settled. There are so many Cuban Americans in Miami that the Miami Herald , the city's largest newspaper, publishes separate editions in English and Spanish. The widespread use of Spanish in American cities has generated a public debate over language.

Some English speakers point to Canada, where the existence of two languages English and French has been accompanied by a secessionist movement. To head off such a development in the United States, some citizens are calling for a law declaring English the official American language. Others consider such a law unnecessary and likely to cause harm. They point to differences between America and Canada in Canada, for example, most speakers of French live in one locale, the province of Quebec, whereas speakers of Spanish are dispersed throughout much of the United States and cite Switzerland as a place where the existence of multiple languages does not undermine national unity.

Recognition of English as the official language, they argue, would stigmatize speakers of other languages and make it difficult for them to live their daily lives. Some citizens feared that their culture was being threatened or that they would lose jobs to newcomers willing to accept low wages. For the first time, the United States set limits on how many people from each country it would admit. The number of people allowed to emigrate from a given country each year was based on the number of people from that country already living in the United States.

As a result, immigration patterns over the next 40 years reflected the existing immigrant population, mostly Europeans and North Americans. Prior to , U. People in the American West feared that the Chinese and other Asians would take away jobs, and racial prejudice against people with Asian features was widespread. The law that kept out Chinese immigrants was repealed in , and legislation passed in allows people of all races to become U.

Today Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country. About 10 million people of Asian descent live in the United States.