Mexico now trails behind both China and India in terms of the number of immigrants arriving in the United States, new government data shows. The Wall Street Journal reports that China was the number one origin country for immigrants in 2013, with a figure of 147,000, with India in the number two spot on 129,000 and Mexico in third place with just 125,000.
Other nations high on the list when it comes to immigrant origin include different Asian countries such as the Philippines, Japan and South Korea. China and Mexico were fighting for the top spot just one year earlier in 2012, with Mexico narrowly beating China by 125,000 immigrants to 124,000. The Wall Street Journal says that the new study examined data from the annual American Community Survey from the Census Bureau between the years 2000 and 2013 and the results were presented at San Diego’s Population Association of American conference last week.
The Journal says the study demonstrates that immigration from Mexico is on the wane, while the number of immigrants from India and China have grown over the course of the last ten years.
“A shift in America’s immigrant community will take far longer,” the Journal report states. “In 2012, five times as many immigrants in the US were from Mexico than China, but the changing nature of the immigrant flows seen in the census study provide a glimpse of what is likely to happen to the overall racial and ethnic makeup of the US population.”