The nation's foreign-born population numbered 34.2 million last year, 2.3 percent
higher than it was in 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
USA Today reports that demographers say immigrants who moved to America from 2000 to 2004 were
better educated than those who immigrated in the late 1990s. From 2000 to last
year, 34.3 percent of immigrants age 25 or older had a bachelor's degree or
higher, compared with 32.5 percent in the late 1990s, a demographer tells the newspaper.
In 2004, the foreign-born population accounted for 12 percent of the total
U.S. population.
Within the foreign-born population, 53 percent were born in Latin America,
25 percent in Asia, 14 percent in Europe, and the remaining 8 percent in other
regions of the world, such as Africa and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and
all of the island nations in the Pacific).
Second-generation Americans, natives with one or both parents born in a foreign
country, numbered 30.4 million, or 11 percent of the total U.S. population.
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