Almost 22 percent of the U.S. population speaks a language other than English at home, according to the latest data from the leftist Migration Policy Institute.
The reason: a massive immigration wave that is not only altering what language is spoken at home but is also changing the country’s demography and politics.
MPI’s data provide a detailed look at immigration, such as where immigrants live, how much education they have, and how many live in poverty.
But numbers are what count in the voting booth.
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Forty-four Million Foreign Born
MPI’s data show a changed country that has absorbed 44 million immigrants who represent 13.5 percent of the population. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is at its highest level since 1910,” MPI reported.
However, the recent arrivals have not been assimilating nearly to the extent of past immigration waves that were comprised of foreigners much more likely to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, become productive citizens, support the country’s cultural and political traditions, and consider themselves American. Unfortunately, MPI does not make this point, but it does provide data showing that, because fertility rates in the United States are dismal, immigration is the “main driver” of this country’s population growth, which is 15 percent or higher in 15 unfortunate states:
Between 2010 and 2016, the number of immigrants in the United States increased by 9 percent. The foreign-born population grew by 15 percent or more in 15 states: North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Delaware, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Indiana, Florida, Nevada, Washington, Iowa, and Maryland…. Approximately 9 million immigrants, or one in every five, reside in these 15 states.
But some states have been impacted more than others. In North Dakota, the foreign-born population grew 48 percent, while South Dakota’s grew 39 percent and Nebraska’s 20 percent. West Virginia’s grew 41 percent.
And those figures don’t provide the whole picture of a changing country. While the percentage of the population speaking a foreign language at home is 22 percent, the actual number is a little more shocking: 65,420,400 nationwide, with 12,168,200 in those 15 states. Florida’s number is the highest, with 5.6 million, or nearly 29 percent of its population speaking Spanish at home.
“Unauthorized Immigrants”
MPI also presents notable data on who is here legally and who isn’t, and where illegal aliens live. “The 15 states were home to about 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the 2010-14 period, or about 15 percent of the 11 million unauthorized population in the United States,” MPI reported.
As well, the U.S. government and its constellation of taxpayer-subsidized “resettlement” agencies augmented that contingent of illegal aliens with boatloads of refugees.
In total, approximately 120,100 refugees, or one-quarter of the 491,400 admitted to the United States during the 2010-16 period, were resettled in these 15 states. They accounted for 10 percent of total foreign-born population growth in these states over this period.
Seventy-five percent of refugees resettled in the 15 states were from one of five countries: Burma (32,100), Bhutan (18,900), Iraq (13,400), Somalia (13,000), or Cuba (12,400). The composition varied across states, with 58 percent of Cubans settling in Florida, 13 percent of Bhutanese in Pennsylvania, and 12 percent of Somalis in Minnesota.
What the Americans who live in these state think about this we are not given to know. But we do know, thanks to MPI, that many of those immigrants — legal, illegal or refugee — landed in the United States since the turn of the century.
“Immigrants residing in the top 15 states arrived in the country more recently than the foreign-born population overall,” MPI reported:
In 2016, 21 percent of the foreign born in these states entered in 2010 or later, 28 percent arrived during the 2000s, and the remaining 51 percent came before 2000. Among all immigrants, 18 percent arrived since 2010, 27 percent came during the 2000s, and 55 percent entered before 2000.
What’s MPI?
MPI is a leftist immigration think tank with a seemingly bipartisan cast. Its chairman, James Ziglar, was President George W. Bush’s chief of Immigration and Naturalization, now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But MPI’s other trustees connect it firmly to the left. One worked for leftist George Soros’ Open Society Institute, now the Open Society Foundations, while another is connected to the Urban Institute.
Given that few if any Europeans or Americans are migrating to Africa, Asia or the Middle East, MPI’s mission is, obviously, pushing Third World migration to the West.
“Fair, smart, transparent, and rights-based immigration and refugee policies can promote social cohesion, economic vitality, and national security,” it claims, and “given the opportunity, immigrants become net contributors and create new social and economic assets.”
MPI wants to create policies that “bring benefits to immigrants and their families, communities of origin and destination, and sending and receiving countries.”
MPI doesn’t tell readers, at least as far as the United States are concerned, that most immigrants vote for Democrats, as the data clearly show, and will push the country’s social and economic policies to the left.
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