The percentage of US workers born overseas has more than tripled across the course of the last forty years. The Migration Policy Institute conducted an analysis of data from the US Census Bureau, after which they concluded that between 1970 and 2014 there was an increase of 12 percent in the number of workers born in a foreign country now in the American civilian labor force, rising from five percent to 17 percent.
The rate of growth means that that while one in twenty workers was an immigrant back in 1970, today it is one in every six. Over the course of the same period of time, the share of the US population to have been born overseas has also risen from just 4.7 percent to as much as 13.3 percent.
In 2014, 1.3 million immigrants came to the United States. India was the country that was the top source of immigration, with 147,500 coming from that country, followed by China in second place with 131,800, Mexico with 130,000, and Canada with 41,200. The Philippines was the origin point for 40,500 immigrants that arrived in the United States during that year.
The Migration Policy Institute notes that the current trend of Asian and Latin American immigration is dramatically different to the trend back in 1960, when the great majority of immigrants came from Europe and yet no single nation was responsible for over 15 percent of the complete immigrant population.