Almost half of U.S. foreign-born in past decade had college

Almost half of the foreign-born who moved to the U.S. in the past decade were college-educated, a level of education greatly exceeding immigrants from previous decades, as the arrival of highly skilled workers supplanted workers in fields like construction that shrunk after the Great Recession.

New figures released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau show that 47% of the foreign-born population who arrived in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 36% of native-born Americans and 31% of the foreign-born population who entered the country in or before 2009.

A number of push and pull factors, some decades in the making, were responsible. What resulted were drops in immigration from Latin America and increases in Asian immigrants who tended to be better educated, experts said.

The changes in immigration had nothing to do with policies from the administration of President Donald Trump, which has attempted to discourage migration across the southern border and often portrayed immigrants as burdens on the U.S. health, safety and welfare systems, demographers said.

These data do not comport with statements by the Trump administration, which have never been based on facts, but on an apparent desire to scapegoat immigrants as the cause of America's woes, said Cynthia Feliciano, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Even if we were considering the period prior to 2009, when the educational profile of immigrants was not skewed so highly, the notion that immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy is just not supported by the evidence."
What you see is a crossover around 2007 to 2009. You see this crossover, where you have China and India as the largest source countries."
He added, It's as much a story about the massive decline in migration from Mexico and central America, as it is a story about increased Asian migration."