In the 15 years since 2000, 75% of the population growth in the United States has been the result of immigration. Should the current trend continue, a further 100 million people are likely to be added to the United States in this manner within the next 50 years, a new report claims.
The report from Negative Population Growth, an immigration reductionist group, was published this week and suggests that immigration, including births to immigrant women, has been responsible for as much as three-quarters of the population growth in the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies’ director of policy studies, Jessica Vaughan, authored the document, which looks at some of the major reasons for this trend and specifically family-based immigration.
“Since the 1970s, more than half of the legal immigrants admitted were in the family categories,” the report states. “In the last three decades, family immigration has accounted for more than 60% of total legal immigration. In 2013, family immigration’s share of total immigration was 66%.” Around two million immigrants came to the United States in the 1970s as the result of family immigration; this figure has now reached over 6.5 million.
Vaughan says that family immigration is unaffected by factors such as trouble in their homeland or economic issues; however, the biggest factor that prevents more immigrants coming to the United States is the speed of processing such cases by American immigration officers. She added that the more people who are allowed to immigrate, the more who will opt to do so and the more who will go on to sponsor their family members.