North America
Recent Activity
Over half of the foreign born in the United States in 2005 arrived in 1990 or later. MPI's Jeanne Batalova and Aaron Terrazas look at the countries of origin, education levels, occupations, and other characteristics of newer immigrants.
The U.S. Congress is considering a bill that includes a points system for permanent immigration. MPI's Demetrios G. Papademetriou outlines how points systems work, which countries have used them, their political benefits, and trends in points-system use.
In the United States, the academic success of children of Chinese and Korean immigrants usually is attributed to either their culture or the U.S. immigration system, which favors skilled migrants. Min Zhou and Susan S. Kim of the University of California, Los Angeles compare the after-school institutions in these communities to explain the effect of ethnicity on educational outcomes.
This report offers a series of original charts that depict the characteristics of recent immigrants who are representative of those likely to be affected by the proposed merit-based points system for selecting permanent immigrants to the United States.
While official measures of annual permanent immigration levels simply account for those who obtain lawful permanent resident status in a particular year, this report offers a more complex approximation by including estimates of certain forms of temporary immigration and unauthorized immigration in the calculus.
Relatively little is known about migration that involves more than one destination. Ayumi Takenaka of Bryn Mawr College examines the available data to assess who re-migrates to the United States.
MPI's Dawn Konet and Julia Gelatt report on the Strive Act and a White House plan for immigration reform, the delay in implementing Real ID requirements, the Child Citizen Protection Act, and more.
Canada's New Tech Talent Strategy Takes Aim at High-Skilled Immigrants in the United States
Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy is highly unusual for its explicit targeting of visa holders in another country. Opening a dedicated stream specifically for high-skilled immigrants in the United States who hold an H-1B visa is the latest salvo in a growing global competition for talent—one in which some countries are racing ahead of the United States in terms of policy dynamism, as this commentary explores.