Census: West has decidedly foreign flavor

Thursday, Sept. 14, 2000 | 11:12 a.m.

The West is the best -- at least for immigrant waves from Asia and Latin America, a report issued by the Census Bureau finds.

The number of foreign-born residents in the country has swelled to a post-World War II high of 26.1 million as of last year, and many of those immigrants are settling in the West and Southwest, according to report author Angela Brittingham, a bureau demographic analyst.

The West is home to 39.3 percent of the foreign-born in the country, followed by the South with 26.5 percent, the Northeast with 23.9 percent and the Midwest with 10.3 percent.

Brittingham said the numbers reflect the two largest groups coming to the United States: 34.1 percent from Mexico and Central America and 27.1 percent from Asia.

Asians tend to land on the West Coast, often settling in California and Washington; people from Mexico and Central America arrive in the U.S. through California and the Southwestern states, including Nevada, she said.

Brittingham's analysis did not break out the numbers by state, and looked at national origin rather than ethnicity. But the analysis bears out Census Bureau estimates released earlier this month that showed Nevada has had a 123.7 percent increase in the Asian population and a 144.6 percent increase in the Hispanic population during the 1990s.

While the last great immigration wave of the late 1800s was mostly from Europe, now only 16.1 percent of foreign-born residents are from across the Atlantic.

Brittingham said this trend is a dramatic reversal of decades of immigration patterns. In the early 1980s, she said, nearly 40 percent of immigrants arrived from Europe.

Now, about half of all immigration comes from Latin America, including Mexico; only 17 percent of all new immigration comes from Europe, she said.

Other findings in the study:

* Foreign-born residents of the United States are about as likely as other Americans to be college graduates. The bureau said 25.4 percent had at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 25.2 percent of native-born Americans with degrees. But about 11 percent of those from Latin America had bachelor's degrees, compared with 45 percent of migrants from Asia.

* The report said that about four in 10 foreign-born adults had a high school diploma, compared with more than six in 10 for other adults. Nearly one in four of the foreign-born adults had less than a ninth-grade education, compared with one in 20 of the rest of the 25-and-over population.

* The longer a foreign-born person has been here the more likely the person is to be a citizen. Some 78.8 percent of those who arrived before 1970 have obtained citizenship. The rate is 58.8 percent for those arriving in the 1970s and 33.7 percent for those who came here in the 1980s.

* 18 percent of the foreign-born live in poverty, compared with 12.1 percent of the native population. Mexicans and Central Americans are most likely to be in poverty, 27.5 percent. The lowest poverty rate, 10.5 percent, was among Europeans.

* The percentage of foreign-born residents is not the highest it has ever been. Almost 10 percent of the population is foreign-born now, but in 1890 about 15 percent were foreign born, Brittingham said.