Large Shift in U.S. Immigrant Makeup Projected

The percentage of foreign-born U.S. residents with deep roots in the country is rising and will continue to soar in the coming decades, a USC analysis released Thursday shows.

The percentage of foreign-born residents who have lived in the United States at least 20 years climbed from 30.4 percent of the foreign-born population in 2000 to an estimated 38.5 percent in 2010, according to the report.

The report, published by the Population Dynamics Research Group at USC, forecasts that by 2030 the majority of foreign-born residents–or 52.6 percent–will have resided in the U.S. for at least two decades, laying the basis for stronger social, economic and civic ties among the foreign-born population as they assimilate, the report says.

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{snip} These estimates provide information not available in the 2010 Census, the first census in over a century that did not record residents’ place of birth.

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The percentage of those living in the United States who are foreign-born or children of immigrants will jump from 22.5 percent in 2010 to 30.5 percent by 2040, according to the projection.

That’s a level that hasn’t been reached since 1930, the report says.

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Other findings of the report, “Projections of the U.S. Population, 2010-2040, by Immigrant Generation and Foreign Born Duration in the U.S.,” include:

-The total U.S. population is predicted to hit 391.1 million in 2040, a number 13 million below the latest projection issued in 2008 by the U.S. Census Bureau.

-Rates of annual immigration, which slowed during the Great Recession, are not expected to return to the peak levels experienced in 2000. Net immigration, estimated to be less than 1 million in 2009, is projected to rise to 1.18 million in 2015 and 1.25 million in 2025. Pitkin and Myers convened a panel of leading national demographic and economic experts to forecast the annual immigration rate.

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[Editor’s Note: Read the full report here.]