As President Obama looks to accept thousands of Syrian refugees now flooding into Europe, a new Senate report finds that the United States already has 10 million more foreign-born citizens than all of the European Union.
The report found that the U.S. immigrant population totals 45.8 million compared to 35 million in the EU, where nations are starting to shut their borders to the Syrian refugees. And even adding in the 7.7 million immigrants in Latin America, the United States has more than all 21 Latin and 27 European Union nations combined.
A report from a Senate Judiciary subcommittee issued Thursday said: “The total migrant population in all of Latin America is 7.75 million (many being regional migrants), meaning that the U.S. has admitted more people from outside its boundaries than 21 different Latin American countries put together and the E.U, combined.”
And because the EU has a far bigger population than the United States, the immigrant-to-native born ratio is higher in the U.S.
A background document from the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, chaired by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, said as a share of population, roughly 1 in 14 were born outside the E.U. compared to nearly 1 in 7 in the U.S.
From the subcommittee:
Both the United States and the E.U. – particularly the wealthiest nations in the E.U. – are struggling with the economic and societal effects of unmitigated immigration. Yet, even though the United States has taken in nearly 11 million more migrants born outside its boundaries than the E.U. has taken in from outside its own, American politicians are pushing to increase immigration while many E.U. nations are pushing to reduce it.
The most recent major immigration bill considered by the U.S. Congress – the Senate’s ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration bill – proposed to dramatically increase future immigration, including tripling the grants of new permanent residency offered within a single decade. Similarly, the industry-supported Immigration Innovation Act of 2015 (or I-squared) would substantially boost annual net migration into the United States.
Given these events, and the American public’s preference – by a wide margin – for immigration reductions, it is worth comparing the relative size and composition of the foreign-born populations in both the U.S. and E.U. countries. For the purposes of uniform international analyses, the chart is produced from official United Nations and European Commission data.
Since citizens of E.U. countries can move into other E.U. countries – in much the same way that citizens of California can move to Missouri – this analysis focuses on a comparison of the number of people living in the U.S. who were born outside the U.S. to the number of people living in the E.U. who were born outside the E.U. Nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents were born outside the United States while about 1 in 14 E.U. residents were born outside the E.U.
The ten most populous countries in the E.U. (Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Poland, and Romania) contain about 415 million of the E.U.’s 500-million plus residents. These ten E.U. countries are home to 28 million people born outside the E.U. – or nearly 20 million fewer people than the number of people in the U.S. born outside the U.S. (Even including intra-E.U. migration, these 10 countries still have nearly 3 million fewer migrants than the U.S. despite having a population nearly 100 million larger than the U.S.) As a share of population, roughly 1 in 15 residents of these countries were born outside the E.U., again compared to nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents being born outside the U.S. To put that in context, in 1970 fewer than 1 in 21 U.S. residents was foreign-born. Assuming no law is passed to reduce the annual immigration rates, Census Bureau projects that the foreign-born population share in the United States will soon eclipse every prior record, and will continue rising to new all-time records every year to come– lowering wages for today’s workers, both immigrant and U.S.-born. This autopilot growth in the labor supply continues even as automation steadily reduces demand for workers.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
