Immigration & Migration

Although the cost of sending remittances is now much lower than in the late 1990s, the rate of decline has slowed markedly in the past three years.

This survey brief compares the views and experiences of Latinos living in five states with large Latino populations. Topics include country of origin, identity, citizenship, politics and discrimination.

This survey brief explores the concept of assimilation and the role of language in explaining this process.

This survey brief explores the languages Latinos speak in the United States. A close look is taken at those Latinos who speak both English and Spanish.

This survey brief explores the differences in demographics, attitudes and experiences of first, second and third generation or higher Latinos. It also looks at "generation one and a half," those Latinos who arrived in the United States before age 10.

Adapting to a New World

Adapting to a New World

In light of President George W. Bush's January 7, 2004 announcement of a new immigration initiative, the Pew Hispanic Center provided information about attitudes towards immigrant and immigration policy, and estimates of the size of the undocumented population in the United States. Sources for the data are the National Survey of Latinos, conducted in 2002 jointly by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center's March 2002 report entitled "How Many Undocumented: The Numbers Behind the U.S.-Mexico Migration Talk."

Across the United States some six million immigrants from Latin America now send money to their families back home on a regular basis. The number of senders and the sums they dispatched grew even when the U.S. economy slowed, and looking to the future, the growth seems likely to continue and potentially to accelerate. The total remittance flow from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean could come close to $30 billion this year, making it by far the largest single remittance channel in the world.

As it continues to grow, the composition of the Hispanic population is undergoing a fundamental change: Births in the United States are outpacing immigration as the key source of growth. Over the next twenty years this will produce an important shift in the makeup of the Hispanic population with second-generation Latinos--the U.S.-born children of immigrants-- emerging as the largest component of that population. Given the very substantial differences in earnings, education, fluency in English, and attitudes between foreign-born and native-born Latinos, this shift has profound implications for many realms of public policy, and indeed for anyone seeking to understand the nature of demographic change in the United States.