Almost half of foreign-born population in past decade had college

ORLANDO, Fla. — Almost half of the foreign-born who moved to the U.S. in the past decade were college-educated, a level of education greatly exceeding immigrants from previous decades, as the arrival of highly skilled workers supplanted workers in fields like construction that shrunk after the Great Recession.

New figures released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau show that 47% of the foreign-born population who arrived in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36% of native-born Americans and 31% of the foreign-born population who entered the country in or before 2009.

A number of “push and pull” factors, some decades in the making, were responsible. What resulted were drops in immigration from Latin America and increases in Asian immigrants who tended to be better educated, experts said.

The changes in immigration had nothing to do with policies from the administration of President Donald Trump, which has attempted to discourage migration across the southern border and often portrayed immigrants as burdens on the U.S. health, safety and welfare systems, demographers said.

“Even if we were considering the period prior to 2009, when the educational profile of immigrants was not skewed so highly, the notion that immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy is just not supported by the evidence,” said Cynthia Feliciano, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Immigration from Latin American has been declining for more than a decade, and in the past several years it has even reversed itself with regard to Mexicans, who up until a dozen years ago were the greatest source of new immigrants in the U.S. In the past several years, more Mexicans living in the U.S. went back than came north across the border. Plummeting fertility rates in Mexico starting two decades ago shrunk the number of young job-seekers who would have headed north to the U.S., and the Great Recession a dozen years ago and its aftermath caused the disappearance of jobs in some industries like construction that were attractive to workers with little formal education, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside. “The big thing you see, up through 2008, Mexico was the largest-sending country to the U.S., followed by China and India,” Ramakrishnan said. “What you see is a crossover around 2007 to 2009 ... where you have China and India as the largest source countries.”