Asian Immigrants Surpass Latinos, According to Study

Although the Pew Research Center's recent report found that newly arrived Asian immigrants now outnumber those of Latino descent, many immigration experts believe that this new U.S. immigration trend will not create any huge waves of change in terms of federal policy .

“I don’t think things are necessarily going to change much,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, recently told The Washington Post. “Even if Asians are the biggest new immigrant group, the blip of a few percentage points is not going to change the fact that today’s immigration flow is remarkably undiverse. That’s what drives much of the political concern in the public.”

According to the Post, the rise of Asian immigration has been occurring since 2009, and has coincided with the decline of new immigrants arriving from Mexico. This decline also occurred shortly after the U.S. job market began experiencing sharp levels of unemployment and the number of deportations for undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central American countries continues to grow. Unlike Krikorian, the Pew Research Center believes these factors will change the way many people view immigration in the future.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, an independent research and policy center, told the source that individuals from India make up one of the largest percentages of new immigrants from Asian countries.

“If it continues, the face of immigrants in the country will change, and perhaps the reaction to immigration will change,” Frey said. “People have different perceptions of Asians than they do of Hispanics. Asians have always been seen as the model minority.”

According to the source, more than two in three adult Asians have attended college or already have, compared to only 16 percent of Latinos in the United States, which has made Asians "the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history."