The argument being made conflates illegal and legal immigration. American legal immigration continues to exceed one million annually, easily dwarfing any other country.
"Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, at just over 37,000,000 legal immigrants"
But we aren't talking about years, are we? We are talking about total numbers of immigrants allowed. What is the USA's ranking in total legal immigration?
The US does currently take over 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. Certainly, a reasonable person could argue that number should be higher, but that's still a pretty high number for a country that is "closing its doors".
Immigration is a reality, it always has been. There is no broad support for cutting off legal immigration, it's uncontrolled immigration that most people object to.
The US has always had huge levels of immigration and probably always will.
This is pretty spot on. I honestly don't remember the legal immigration numbers off the top of my head, I think it's something like a million, certainly hundreds of thousands a year, and as you point out, illegal immigration numbers are all over the map (I think the range is something like 10 - 30 million total, not annual but don't quote me). It is important to remember that the US is huge, so it's not the same as Germany taking in 500,000 people by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm always curious when people say they advocate increasing immigration. Right now, the United States takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. Does this seem too low a number to you? If so, do you see a practical need for some kind of limit, or are you in favor of limitless immigration?
Can you cite your sources? It is especially important when you are making potentially provocative claims ("doom and disaster", "shit tons of legal immigration").
In (fiscal year) 2017, the US admitted 1.1 million immigrants, 1.2 million in 2016. [1] US population has been increasing at about 2.3 million per year [2].
Does the US have more illegal immigrants as a proportion of it's population than other Western nations? I'm asking because I genuinely don't know. (I was tempted to put quotes around illegal immigrants because it's a fairly contested term but that would have possibly set the wrong tone)
I do get the sense that every country thinks they are a special case with regards to immigration. We definitely seemed to go through that phase in the UK.
According to the Migration Policy Institute (http://www.migrationinformation.org), about 6,195,000 immigrants arrived legally into the United States between 1995 and 2000. I grabbed this pretty quickly off the web. I'd imagine the numbers were even higher between 2000 and 2005.
It always surprises me that people who are ok with a million immigrants a year, but maybe not ok with a whole lot more than that, are accused of being anti-immigrant.
I'm all for "letting people from everywhere come in and live their American Dream", but as a practical matter, I think there have to be limits. Well over a million a year, in my opinion, seems like a pretty generous limit, even for a fairly large country like the US.
Absolute numbers seems legitimate. The US per capita immigration rate is largely the result of the high absolute number of immigrants taken in over US history.
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Together immigrants and their U.S. born children account for roughly 75 percent of annual population increase in the U.S. In absolute terms, that’s an additional 2.25 million people each year.
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