Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 30, 1995 TAG: 9508300081
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVEN A. HOLMES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The Census Bureau's report this week that the percentage of the country's population that is foreign-born is at its highest level since World War II and is accelerating at a record pace has taken demographers aback and is fueling an already intense debate over immigration.
The surprising figures result in part from a declining birth rate among native-born Americans, but more from increased immigration. The proportion of Americans who were born elsewhere increased to 8.7 percent last year, or 22.6 million people, according to the Census Bureau. The bureau estimated that about 4 million of the immigrants were in the United States illegally.
The proportion of immigrants is the highest since 1940, when it was 8.8 percent, although it remains far short of the century's high of 14.7 percent in 1910. Since 1970, the percentage has doubled. From 1990 to 1994, 4.5 million immigrants came to the United States, nearly as many as landed during the entire decade of the 1970s.
Though it is written in the flat prose of government demographic reports, the study, ``The Foreign Born Population: 1994'' is sure to add to the debate over immigration, which already has emerged as a hot issue in the presidential race.
The issue is particularly incendiary in large states like California and New York, the two whose populations contain the highest proportion of foreign-born residents. According to the report, nearly 25 percent of California's population and 16 percent of New York's was born outside the United States.
In New Jersey, 13.5 percent of residents were born outside the United States.
Although the United States is a nation that has been built largely by successive waves of immigration, the rising number of immigrants has been the subject of an increasingly bitter debate.
Proposed laws and ballot initiatives have sought to limit the arrival of immigrants or to cut them off from a variety of government benefits.
But despite the widespread attention given to the subject, demographers interviewed Tuesday said they were surprised by the large number of recent immigrants, both legal and illegal, turned up in the bureau's study.
``It's a very high percentage,'' said Jeffrey Passel, director of the Program for Research on Immigration Policy at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. He found especially striking the fact that about one in five arrived in the last five years. ``That's much higher than numbers we've had historically, going back 20, 30, 40, 100 years,'' he said.
Historians, economists, social scientists and advocates for tightened controls on immigration say the rising proportion of foreign-born residents could have striking effects on the country's economic, social and political environment.
Already a number of bills have been introduced in Congress to deny public assistance to legal immigrants or to make their sponsors financially responsible for them, to streamline deportation of undocumented workers, to crack down on alien smuggling, to end the automatic granting of asylum to Cuban refugees and to beef up the Border Patrol.
by CNB