New U.S. Immigrants Are as Educated as New Canadian Immigrants

President Trump wants to cut legal immigration bymore than 40 percent, complaining that the system focuses on family reunification rather than skills. In defending the plan, Attorney General Jeff Sessionsgeneralized today ’s immigrants as largely “illiterate”, with “no skills”, and argued that America “should be like Canada” on immigration, evaluating them on their skills. Yet, recent U.S. immigrants are better educated the U.S.-born, and differ little from recent Canadian immigrants.Figure 1 provides the educational attainment distribution for U.S.-born working-age adults (25-64) compared to recent U.S. working-age immigrants (arrival from 2012 to 2016). As it shows, nearly half of all recent working-age immigrantshad a college degree or higher, compared to just 32 percent of the U.S.-born working-age population. Recent immigrant workers to America are 50 percent more likely to have graduated college than U.S.-born workers. Moreover, among college graduates they are much more likely to have advanced degrees.Figure 1: U.S.-Born Citizens and Recent Immigrants to the United States by Education, Ages 25-64*Sources:American Community Survey, 2016 5-Year Sample *Including all adults over 25 reduces recent immigrant share of bachelor ’s degrees to 47 percent and U.S.-born share to 30 percentFigure 2 provides the educational attainment distribution for recent working-age immigrants to the United States compared to recent working-age immigrants to Canada (arrival from...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 22, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: David Bier Source Type: blogs