Even as Trump Cut Immigration, Immigrants Transformed U.S.

To grasp the impact of the latest great wave of immigration to the United States, consider the city of Grand Island, Neb.: More than 60 percent of public school students are nonwhite, and their families collectively speak 55 languages. During drop-off at Starr Elementary on a recent morning, parents bid their children goodbye in Spanish, Somali and Vietnamese.

“You wouldn’t expect to see so many languages spoken in a school district of 10,000,” said Tawana Grover, the school superintendent who arrived from Dallas four years ago. “When you hear Nebraska, you don’t think diversity. We’ve got the world right here in rural America.”

The students are the children of foreign-born workers who flocked to this city of 51,000 in the 1990s and 2000s to toil in the area’s meatpacking plants, where speaking English was less necessary than a willingness to do the grueling work.

They came to Nebraska from every corner of the globe: Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans who floated across the Rio Grande on inner tubes, in search of a better life; refugees who fled famine in South Sudan and war in Iraq to find safe haven; Salvadorans and Cambodians who spent years scratching for work in California and heard that jobs in Nebraska were plentiful and the cost of living low.

The story of how millions of immigrants since the 1970s have put down lasting roots across the country is by now well-known. What is less understood about President Trump’s four-year-long push to shut the borders and put “America First” is that his quest may prove ultimately a futile one. Even with one of the most severe declines in immigration since the 1920s, the country is on an irreversible course to becoming ever more diverse, and more dependent on immigrants and their children.

The president since the moment he took office issued a torrent of orders that reduced refugee admissions; narrowed who is eligible for asylum; made it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; tightened scrutiny of applicants for high-skilled worker visas; and sought to limit the length of stay for international students. His policies slashed the number of migrants arrested and then released into the country from nearly 500,000 in the 2019 fiscal year to 15,000 in the 2020 fiscal year.

The measures worked: “We are going to end the decade with lower immigration than in any decade since the ’70s,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who analyzed newly available census data.

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But as Grand Island shows, nothing that Mr. Trump has done was able to halt the inexorable shifts unleashed by the biggest wave of immigration since the 1890s, when Southern and Eastern Europeans arrived in huge numbers through Ellis Island.

Even if immigration were to come to a standstill, their offspring would continue to reshape the country.

In 1992, 50 Hispanics were enrolled in Grand Island’s schools. By 2001, there were 1,600 out of about 7,600 students. Now, Latinos account for more than half of the 10,000 students in the district, and there is no forecast that does not show that proportion continuing to accelerate.

A surge in arrivals into the United States began in the 1970s, gathered strength in the 1980s and crested in the early 2000s. Millions of Latin Americans have come. There also has been spectacular growth in the number of Asians, who outnumbered foreign-born Hispanics between 2010 and 2019. The new immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to have a college degree and are integrated into every level of the economy. {snip}

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The foreign-born population grew by 5.6 million in the ’80s, 8.8 million in the ’90s and 11.3 million in the 2000s.

By the time Mr. Trump took office, this contemporary wave of immigration had lifted the foreign-born population to 44.5 million, representing 13.7 percent of the population, the biggest share since 1910. Among them were about 11 million undocumented immigrants.

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The number of immigrants of Asian origin grew by 2.8 million in the nine years ending 2019, more than from any other region. The biggest gains were among Indians and Chinese; the number of Mexicans dropped by 779,000.

Many of the recent immigrants have settled in parts of the country where there is a low concentration of foreign-born people, including in states that voted for Mr. Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

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The children of immigrants who are already here will continue to make the United States more diverse: The 2020 census is expected to show that more than half of people under 18 are people of color.

“The mainstream now increasingly includes people who are nonwhite, particularly from immigrant backgrounds,” said Richard Alba, a sociology professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

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A study released last month found that nearly 30 percent of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2018 hailed from immigrant families, up from 20 percent in 2000.

“When you start having cohorts of college graduates that are so diverse, it’s going to change the work force, which means more people from diverse backgrounds moving into positions of authority and high remuneration,” Mr. Alba said. “There’s no going back.”