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The Immigrant Policy Project

A Quick Look at U.S. Immigrants: Demographics, Workforce, and Asset-Building

June 17, 2004

Immigrants are:

1 in 9 U.S. residents;
1 in 7 U.S. workers;
1 in 5 low-wage workers;
1 in 2 new workers.

Children:

1 in 5 children in the U.S. is an immigrant or has immigrant parents.
75% of the children in immigrant families are U.S. citizens.
1 in 4 poor children is the child of an immigrant.
1 in 3 children without health insurance is in an immigrant family.
The proportion of students in U.S. schools who are children of immigrants doubled from 1980-1997, from 10% to 20%.

Low-wage immigrant workers:

Immigrants' hourly wages are lower on average than those for natives, and nearly half earn less than 200 percent of the minimum wage—versus one-third of native workers.
Immigrant workers are much more likely than natives to drop out of high school (30 versus 8 percent)
Immigrant workers are far more likely to have less than a ninth-grade education (18 versus 1 percent for natives).
Three-fourths of all U.S. workers with less than a ninth-grade education are immigrants.
Nearly two-thirds of low-wage immigrant workers do not speak English proficiently, and most of these workers have had little formal education.
Two of every five low-wage immigrant workers are undocumented. Labor force participation is higher among undocumented men than among men who are legal immigrants or U.S. citizens.

Source: The Urban Institute

“Due to the weak economy, job growth has slowed since 2000 and so has the growth of the labor force. Nonetheless, the foreign-born share of growth has risen, and it reached 51 percent of the total between 1996 and 2002. This share has increased in the slow economy because natives typically have more options, and during periods of weak job growth, they can exit the labor force and pursue other alternatives, such as going back to school.”

Source: The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Asset-Building: Banking and Housing

The Unbanked:

US families       9.1%

Whites, nonHispanic     5.1%

Nonwhite or Hispanic        21.8%

More likely to be unbanked: less educated, younger, low-income, and minorities. Immigrant specific factors include citizenship status; year of migration/tenure in US, and age at migration.

Unbanked Households

Immigrant Groups

Mexican    53%

Latin American 37%

Asian    20%

European   17%

  US Born

Black     46%

Hispanic   34%

Other Race   34%

White 14%

The homeownership rate is 70% for US-born and 49% for immigrants (2000). For citizen immigrants, the homeownership rate is 67% and for noncitizen immigrants 35% (2002).

Immigrant citizens and native homeowners almost equally likely to own 100% of their home and have similar debt to value ratios.
Immigrant citizen homeowners have significantly higher equity values than natives.
Immigrant noncitizens lag behind on every measure, no matter how many years they have spent in the United States.
Housing is a higher proportion of wealth for immigrant citizens and noncitizens than for natives.

Barriers to banking & homeownership:

Cultural assumptions/lack of familiarity with US credit system
Lack of credit history
Use of conventional tools by financial institutions to measure creditworthiness
Language limitations
Conventional mortgage products out of reach for low income
Limited supply of affordable housing
Loan aversion/use of lending networks
Lack of Social Security Number

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conference on Financial Access for Immigrants

A Promising Practice. Poultry plants in Rogers, Arkansas were faced with high turnover rate and a cost of $3,000-$4,000 per employee on recruitment and training, and were considering relocation. Arvest Bank helped them set up onsite financial literacy training at the plant for citizen and immigrant workers. The plants provided classroom space and paid the workers to take the classes on the American banking system and homeownership. Arvest Bank also created a special loan program to help immigrants establish a credit history: the bank issued a small loan to an individual, who then reinvested it in a certificate of deposit, and made monthly payments to repay the secured loan. The credit history enabled immigrants to qualify for home mortgages. The training and special loan program resulted in 586 new home loans (without a single default in 8 years), generating $26 million in business for the bank. The poultry plants saw employee turnover drop from 200 to 15%, enabling them to stay in the region and contributing millions of dollars in business and taxes to the local economy. Source: Georgetown University.

The Changing Face of America

In the 1990s, the foreign-born population of the United States nearly doubled, to 31 million, or 11% of the US population of 281 million. In absolute numbers, this compares to the peak arrivals of the early 19^th century, though the percentage was higher then, at 13%. Approximately 40% arrived in the 1990s, and 28% in the 1980s. The breakdown by race is white – 75%, African-American – 12%, Asian – 3.6%; and Hispanics, who may be of any race, totaled 35 million or about 13% of the total population.

The Hispanic population has increased by more than 50% since 1990, from 22 to 35 million, compared to an increase of 13% for the total US population. Mexicans comprise slightly more than half of the Hispanic population at 20 million.

One-third of the foreign-born population is from Mexico or a Central American country. Of the total foreign-born population, 51% were born in Latin America; 25.5% were born in Asia, 15.3% were born in Europe, and the remaining 8.1% were born in other regions of the world.

Legal status:

Naturalized Citizens: 10.3 million / 30%

Legal immigrants: 10.5 million / 30%

Undocumented: 9.3 million / 27%

Legal nonimmigrants 1.6 million / 5%

Refugees 2.7 million / 8%

Total: 34.5 million foreign-born in 2002

Source: Urban Institute

English Proficiency

The Limited-English Proficient (LEP) population, which is comprised of both citizens and noncitizens, has doubled from 1980 to 2000, from 6% to 12%, or 25 million adults. 40% of foreign-born children have limited English proficiency. Half of LEP children attend schools in which a third or more of their classmates have limited English proficiency. Only 42 percent of Limited English Proficient students in middle school receive specialized language instruction.

Dispersal to New Receiving Communities

More than 2/3 of all foreign-born reside in 6 states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois. But the story of the 1990s is the increasing numbers of immigrants settling in nontraditional urban and rural receiving communities, particularly in the southern and midwestern states. During the 1990s, the Hispanic population more than doubled in Arkansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Increasingly Diverse

Within the broad Hispanic or Asian categories, the foreign-born resettling in the U.S. are quite diverse. Within the 35 million counted as Hispanic or Latino (13% of the US population), more than half are Mexican; the remainder are Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Panamanian, Salvadoran, Argentinean, Bolivian, Chilean, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Paraguayan, Peruvian, and Venezuelan. The Asian and Pacific Islander Americans are estimated at 11 million (or 4% of the US population), with almost 60 different national and ethnic origins, such as China, southeast Asia, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, etc. States, particularly the newly-receiving states, are grappling with the challenges of providing services for a variety of languages, cultures, religions, health practices, and customs of the new immigrant communities.

STATE estimates: greatest % change from 1990-2000

persons of Hispanic origin Asian and Pacific Islander

(any race) (race)

Alabama 208 50

Arkansas 337 75

Delaware 136 83

Georgia 300 134

Indiana 117 63

Iowa 153 48

Kentucky 173 75

Minnesota 166 85

Mississippi 148 48

Nebraska 155 83

Nevada 217 159

North Carolina 394 126

Oregon 144 58

South Carolina 211 68

Tennessee 278 85

Utah 138 57

Counties:

One out of 14 counties in the United States is a “New Ellis Island”, with foreign-born population that increased 1991-1998 by more than 50%, according to INS statistics on lawful permanent residents’ intended residence. 131 of these counties are in the South and 75 in the Midwest.

In 28% of the 223 “new Ellis Island” counties, the top-sending country accounts for more than half of the new immigrants. However, in 37% of the counties, no single sending country accounted for more than 25% of the 1990s immigrants.

Cities: The top 10 metropolitan areas in resettling new immigrants (1991-1998) relative to the 1990 population are Nashville, Atlanta, Louisville, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Greensboro-Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Memphis, Portland-Vancouver, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Resources:

Ballentine, James C. Director, Center for Housing, Community and Economic Development, American Bankers Association. Presentation at “Financial Access for Immigrants: Learning from Diverse Perspectives,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, April 15-16, 2004.

Brewer, Cynthia A. and Trudy A. Suchan, U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Special Reports. Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.

Camarota, Steven A. and John Keeley, Center for Immigration Studies. The New Ellis Islands: Examining Non-Traditional Areas of Immigrant Settlement in the 1990s. September 2001.

Capps, Randy, Michael Fix, Jeffrey Passel, Jason Ost, and Dan Perez-Lopez. “A Profile of the Low-Wage Immigrant Workforce,” Immigrant Families and Workers, Brief # 4, The Urban Institute, November 2003.

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “U.S. Immigration and Economic Growth: Putting Policy on Hold” Issue 6, November/December 2003

Fix, Michael, Wendy Zimmermann and Jeffrey S. Passel, The Urban Institute. The Integration of Immigrant Families in the United States, July 2001.

Guzmán, Betsy. U.S. Census Bureau. The Hispanic Population: Census 2000 Brief, issued May 2001.

Kossoudji, Sherie and Stan Sedo, University of Michigan. Conference presentation at “Financial Access for Immigrants: Learning from Diverse Perspectives,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, April 15-16, 2004.

Lawson, David. “Financial Literacy & Homeownership Education: Building Assets for Minority and Immigrant Communities.” National Conference of State Legislatures, March, 2003.

Rhine, Sherrie, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and William Greene, New York University: Survey of Consumer Finance. “The Bank Status Decision of the Foreign Born: Taking that First Step into the Financial Mainstream,” conference presentation from “Financial Access for Immigrants: Learning from Diverse Perspectives,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, April 15-16, 2004.

Schoenholtz, Andrew and Kristin Stanton. Reaching the Immigrant Market: Creating Homeownership Opportunities for New Americans. Georgetown University Institute for the Study of International Migration and the Fanne Mae Foundation. Washington, D.C. 2001.

Sum, Andrew, Neeta Fogg, and Paul Harrington, "Immigrant Workers and the Great American Job Machine: The Contributions of New Foreign Immigration to National and Regional Labor Force Growth in the 1990s," Boston: Northeastern University, Center for Labor Market Studies, August 2002.

U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign-Born Population in the United States: Population Characteristics, March 2000

Zimmermann, Wendy and Karen C. Tumlin, The Urban Institute. Patchwork Policies: State Assistance for Immigrants under Welfare Reform, May, 1999.

This publication was made possible by the generous support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Prepared by Ann Morse
Program Director, Immigrant Policy Project
National Conference of State Legislatures
444 N. Capitol Street, NW, #515
Washington, D.C. 20001
202-624-8697
www.ncsl.org/programs/immig