One in five residents of Northern Virginia is now foreign-born, according to a study by the University of Virginia.
For the first time in commonwealth history, one in 10 Virginia residents was born outside the U.S. The overall percentage of foreign-born Virginians has doubled since 1990, according to the report by the university’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
“Most of them are from either Latin American or Asian countries — the top five countries are El Salvador, Mexico, Korea, the Philippines, and India,” said Dr. Qian Cai, a demographics researcher in the Cooper Center.
The trend is related to employment opportunities in the area, Cai said.
Though the median age of foreign-born people is comparable to that of U.S.-born Virginians, nearly three-quarters of the foreign-born population are concentrated in the “prime working age — 25-64,” she said.
Christine Brim, senior vice president for policy and program management at the Center for Security Policy, said the trend was positive for Northern Virginia.
“By and large, Fairfax County is an economic powerhouse built on the work of legal immigrants,” she said. “It’s a tremendously international, diverse community — it’s like New York in 1905.”
The study noted that households headed by foreign-born people have higher median incomes than those headed by American-born Virginians.
But Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that just because immigration is viewed positively by some “doesn’t mean it’s in the interest of the guy next door competing for a job.”
“Once you reach a point where it starts to strain local resources, it does present a problem for most people,” he said.
Mehlman added that immigration doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and can bring with it problems related to health care, education services and, in Northern Virginia, overcrowding for the native population.
Dr. Alan Kraut, professor of immigration history at American University, said there are clear precedents for the trend.
“Historically, immigrants tend to go where the jobs are,” he said. “These areas are magnets for immigrants because of jobs available in construction, home maintenance and the service sector.”
An apparent consequence of the recent influx of Latin American immigrants in particular is their linguistic isolation, the report said.
All adults in 41 percent of their households have some limitation communicating in English, the study added.
