Legal Immigration to U.S. Declines 10% in ’95

Although Congress has proposed cutting levels of legal immigration to the United States, the numbers are falling even without official action--especially in California, where 20% fewer immigrants entered the state in 1995 than the year before, a new report shows.

An analysis released Thursday by the Immigration and Naturalization Service shows that 720,461 legal immigrants were admitted into the country in fiscal 1995--a 10.4% drop from 1994 and 20.3% below 1993 levels.

INS officials attributed the drop to decreases in employment-based visas, the end of special programs begun under the 1986 amnesty law, and reduced admissions of spouses and parents of U.S. citizens.

The numbers do not show falling interest among foreigners wishing to enter the United States, officials said. There remains a huge list--more than 1 million people--of those waiting to join family members here.

There is a multitude of types of visas allowing immigrants to enter the country, some open-ended and others with numerical caps. Although family-based visas remain in intense demand, with never enough to go around, just 85,336 employment-based visas were doled out to skilled immigrants in 1995, well below the 140,000-person cap.

The release of the figures comes amid calls in Congress to alter the number and type of legal immigrants allowed into the country. Bills in the House and Senate originally advocated a series of controversial changes, although both pieces of legislation have been overhauled in recent days.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved smaller reductions in legal immigration, which will be considered separately from illegal immigration reform. The bill, which goes to the full Senate next month, would decrease legal immigration from current levels of about 675,000 per year--not including refugees--to 552,000 annually. An amendment introduced by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) deleted provisions that would have disallowed adult children and siblings from applying to join family members already living in the United States.

The House approved an illegal immigration reform bill last week but struck out any changes in the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country.

The INS endorses moderate reductions in legal immigration but contends that they can be accomplished without significantly changing the current family-based system, according to Executive Associate Commissioner Robert L. Bach.

In its report, the INS says that once legal immigrants arrive, they are straying from the areas in which they traditionally have settled. New York and Los Angeles have had significant drops in immigration levels, while Atlanta, Minneapolis and Orange County experienced the largest recent boosts in immigration levels.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach area received 54,669 legal immigrants last year, far lower than the 77,112 entrants in 1994 and 106,703 in 1993. Orange County had a 17.3% increase from 15,502 legal immigrants in 1994 to 18,187 last year.

Most of California’s legal immigrants last year, according to the INS study, came from Mexico (20.7%), the Philippines (13.6%), Vietnam (10.1%), China (6.2%), India (4%) and El Salvador (3%).

Mexicans represent the largest legal immigrant group in the United States, nonetheless, immigration dropped 19.3% over the last year. The region with the biggest boost in levels of immigrants to the United States was Africa, which had a 58.9% jump. The war in the former Yugoslavia has led to a 144% increase in immigration from that region to this country.