Immigration to the United States
167 quotes
Biography
Immigration has been a major source of population growth and cultural change in the United States throughout much of its history. As of January 2025, the United States has the largest immigrant population in the world in absolute terms, with 53.3 million foreign-born residents, representing 15.8% of the total U.S. population—both record highs.
"New York, from her particular situation, is, perhaps more than any other city in the Union, exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there ...."
"On Monday evening, President Trump pressed send on a tweet declaring that in the next week, ICE would begin removing “the millions of illegal aliens” who are in the United States. This, of course, was not true. ICE deports about 7,000 immigrants per month, which is rather short of the roughly 10.5 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States. The tweet, coming two days before Trump’s big reelection rally, seemed tailor-made to send Democrats into paroxysms of rage and force us into a law-and-order debate in which we stand on the side of the lawbreakers."
"We think it as competent and as necessary for a state to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence, which may arise from unsound and infectious articles imported, or from a ship, the crew of which may be laboring under an infectious disease."
"It has yet to be widely recognized that the immigrant population is growing far more slowly than in recent years, and that the unauthorized population has peaked and may even have declined. The makeup of the foreign-born population is also changing: New arrivals in the United States are more likely to be from Asia and less likely to be from than other world regions, and they are on average more educated than previous generations of migrants to the United States. The Mexican immigrant population in the United States has declined by half a million people since the beginning of the decade. And in 2018, the United States ceded its status as the world’s top country for resettling refugees, surpassed by Canada."
"The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimated 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants resided in the United States in 2016. About half of all unauthorized immigrants resided in three states: California (27 percent), Texas (14 percent), and New York (8 percent). The vast majority (82 percent) lived in 174 counties with 10,000 or more unauthorized immigrants each, of which the top five—Los Angeles County, CA; Harris County, TX; Cook County, IL; Orange County, CA; and Queens County, NY—accounted for 20 percent of all unauthorized immigrants."
"Within two months of Biden taking office, thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America started crossing the border. The government didn’t have enough space to hold all of them as it arranged for sponsors to provide housing inside the country. By late March, there were eighteen thousand children in U.S. custody, and more than five thousand of them were being kept in borderland holding cells. It was the first political crisis of Biden’s Presidency. The atmosphere inside the Administration was tense. “There was a real, active debate between people from the advocacy community and the operational teams watching the trend lines,” Ricardo Zúniga, a former State Department official who served as Biden’s envoy to Central America, told me. “This was right in the middle of unwinding Trump-era policy. . . . Every snippet of messaging coming out of the United States was being misused by migrant smugglers.”"
"Stefanik’s resolution condemning Harris deliberately misconstrues the facts of this global shift. In one of the charges, for instance, Harris is blamed for “a record-breaking 31,077 Chinese nationals encountered at the southwest border.” This reference probably says more about China than it does about the U.S. (An earlier version of the resolution described the Chinese nationals as “communist,” presumably because they had fled a communist country.) The resolution also cites “documents” that were “released” by House Republicans showing that the Biden Administration “flew at least 400,000 illegal immigrants into the country.” There is nothing revelatory about the number, although it is inaccurate to call these immigrants “illegal.” They had availed themselves of the Administration’s signature migration program: an effort to provide legal avenues for migrants to be “paroled” into the country so that they don’t have to take their chances illegally crossing at the border. When the Biden Administration first designed the program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, in 2023, it resulted in a ninety-per-cent drop in border arrivals from the four countries."
"While Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services. Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once “would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries,” Zandi told me. That would force employers to either raise wages to find replacements or, more likely, disrupt production and distribution; both options would raise the prices consumers pay. “If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices,” David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me."
"“These regulations are the final nail in the coffin of ever-increasing barriers to access asylum. If enacted, the rule would treat asylum seekers as nothing more than a nuisance unworthy of consideration or care,” said Richard Caldarone, Tahirih Litigation Counsel. “It would complete the transformation of immigration courts into conveyor belts in a deportation machine that rapidly returns people to violence, torture, and death without the slightest regard for their humanity. The Tahirih Justice Center intends to challenge the rule by any and all possible means.”"
"All Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens and legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, . . .[and] by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. …We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens arrested for crimes. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws."
"We’ve got to do several things, and I am, adamantly against illegal immigrants. We’ve got to do more at our borders and people need to stop employing illegal immigrants."
"We have to send a clear message that just because your child gets across the border that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey."
"The report — “Freezing Out Justice: How Immigration Arrests at Courthouses Are Undermining the Justice System ” — found 67 percent of police officers surveyed reported that immigrants’ fear affected their ability to protect survivors of crime. Sixty-four percent indicated there was “an adverse impact on officer safety.”"
"Immigrants comprise almost 14 percent of the U.S. population, or more than 44 million people out of a total of about 327 million, according to the Census Bureau. Together, immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up about 28 percent of U.S. inhabitants. The figure represents a steady rise from 1970, when there were fewer than ten million immigrants in the United States. But there are proportionally fewer immigrants today than in 1890, when foreign-born residents comprised 15 percent of the population. Mexico is the most common country of origin for U.S. immigrants—constituting 25 percent of the immigrant population—but the proportion of immigrants from South and East Asia—who number about 27 percent—is on the rise."
"While religion has a unifying role in American public life, it also has had a divisive role. Before the 1960s, denominational affiliation, especially whether one was Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, played a defining role in American public identities due to the history of American immigration and the relationship between religion and ethnicity (Herberg 1955). Sociologists have long been interested in the “social sources of denominationalism” and divisions in the American religious field, pointing especially to inequality based in race and class (Niebuhr 1929; Herberg 1955; Roof and McKinney 1987; Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Sherkat 2001; Park and Reimer 2002; Smith and Faris 2005). Although these divides of denominationalism in inequality remain today, the salient symbolic boundaries in the religious field are no longer between denominations as they long have been."
"David is among the estimated 42,000 asylum-seekers who’ve been returned to Mexico in recent months under President Trump’s new asylum policies. The Trump administration calls the policy “Migrant Protection Protocols,” but far from offering protection, the policy has led to a brutal wave of kidnappings in some of Mexico’s most dangerous border cities."
"VICE News spoke with multiple asylum-seekers who have been kidnapped or narrowly escaped being kidnapped upon being returned to Mexico. All of them said they suspected Mexican immigration officials were working in coordination with the cartels. Often, they were grabbed at the bus station or along the three-mile stretch from the Mexican immigration office to their shelter. The stretch between the border and the shelters may be a few miles, but it is among the most dangerous part of a migrant’s journey."
"“It’s pretty clear that the Department of Homeland Security is essentially delivering asylum-seekers and migrants into the hands of kidnappers, and people who are attacking the refugees and migrants when they return,” said Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. She added that in these regions of Mexico, “it’s absolutely pointless to go to the police.”"
"According to a 2010 study, almost a quarter of the world's adults looking to emigrate list the United States as their ideal destination. And once they arrive, these immigrants make an enormous contribution to innovation and growth in the American economy. A Harvard Business School study found that American immigrants of Chinese and Indian descent accounted for 15% of U.S. domestic patents in 2004, up from just 2% in 1975. has estimated that a quarter of technology and engineering businesses started in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had a foreign-born founder. Immigration is thus a great source of America's economic strength."
"Whoever was last off the boat, finding the doors of honest capital closed, rolled up their sleeves and got to work, getting rich the old-fashioned way."
"Webster's defines "assimilation" as..."the process of becoming similar to something." But imbibing these words, dear reader, we are forced to ask, similar to what? If America is a nation of immigrants, then how does one become American?"
"“We created this tracker because there have been so many accounts of horrific attacks on asylum seekers that we needed a tool to assess the scale and scope of these massive human rights abuses,” said Kennji Kizuka, Human Rights First senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection. “There have been more than 400 public reports of rape, torture, kidnapping and other violence against asylum seekers and migrants whom the United States is forcing to wait in some of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere. As the vast majority of asylum seekers have not been interviewed by journalists or human rights monitors, the scale of kidnappings and assaults is clearly much higher than the 400 public reports this year.”"
"“The United States is knowingly sending vulnerable people seeking our protection to be tortured, kidnapped, raped and attacked in Mexico,” said Kizuka. “The Remain in Mexico policy violates U.S. law and treaties, and reflects this administration’s callous disregard for human life. We will continue to collect evidence of the harm caused by this policy, working in collaboration with many other organizations.”"
"The U.S. government is forcing asylum seekers and migrants, including at least 16,000 children and nearly 500 infants under the age of one, to return to Mexico under the “Migrant Protection Protocols”—better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy."
"As of December 15, 2020, there are at least 1,314 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violent assaults against asylum seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico by the Trump Administration under this illegal scheme. Among these reported attacks are 318 cases of children returned to Mexico who were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped."