Immigration to the United States is a complex demographic phenomenon that has been a major source of population growth and cultural change throughout much of the history of the United States. The economic, social, and political aspects of immigration have caused controversy regarding ethnicity, economic benefits, jobs for non-immigrants, settlement patterns, impact on upward social mobility, crime, and voting behavior. In 2006 the United States accepted more legal immigrants as permanent residents than all other countries in the world combined. After ethnic quotas on immigration were removed in 1965 the number of actual (first-generation) immigrants living in the United States eventually quadrupled, from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. Over one million persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. The leading countries of origin of immigrants to the United States were Mexico, India, the Philippines, and China. Nearly 14 million immigrants entered the United States from 2000 to 2010.
Family reunification accounts for approximately two-thirds of legal immigration to the US every year. The number of foreign nationals who became legal permanent residents (LPRs) of the U.S. in 2009 as a result of family reunification (66%) exceeded those who became LPRs on the basis of employment skills (13%) and for humanitarian reasons (17%).
Migration is difficult, expensive, and dangerous for those who enter the US illegally across the Mexico–United States border. Participants in debates on immigration in the early twenty-first century called for increasing enforcement of existing laws governing illegal immigration to the United States, building a barrier along some or all of the 2,000-mile (3,200 km) U.S.-Mexico border, or creating a new guest worker program. Through much of 2006 the country and Congress was immersed in a debate about these proposals. As of April 2010 few of these proposals had become law, though a partial border fence had been approved and subsequently canceled.
Read more about Immigration To The United States: History, Contemporary Immigration, Demography, Public Opinion, Immigration in Popular Culture, Documentary Films, Legal Perspectives, Interpretive Perspectives
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—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)