Every now and again, someone asserts that the US has higher immigration than Europe; sometimes as part of a claim that the US must be better because more people want to live there,
I've meant to get round to checking this for a while, and now I have. I don't have first hand sources to link to; but the second hand sources seem good.
The numbers suggest that in the last 15 years, with a sharp growth in US immigration, the US does have more immgrants than the EU each year : around 1 million compared to 680,000.
The NumbersUSA site is anti-immigration and so has an interest in maximising the numbers to make its point. It says that average immigration into the USA since 1990 is 1 million a year, by far the highest it has ever been in the history of the US.
EurActiv.com Portal puts legal immigration into the EU at 680,000 a year. The two sites suggest that illegal immigration is comparable in both too.
This European statistics (figures from 1997) puts the number of US nationals living in the UK at 278,000 (with 9,000 in Ireland. I can't find how many UK nationals are resident in the US.
It looks to me as if the EU and US have pretty similar immigration numbers, given their respective populations (similar) and land space (more in the US). I don't know if the EU figures have been rising along with the US figures in the '90s or if the US has pulled ahead of the EU over that time, for whatever reasons.
Of course, the figures will be confused soon with the enlargement of the EU.
I've meant to get round to checking this for a while, and now I have. I don't have first hand sources to link to; but the second hand sources seem good.
The numbers suggest that in the last 15 years, with a sharp growth in US immigration, the US does have more immgrants than the EU each year : around 1 million compared to 680,000.
The NumbersUSA site is anti-immigration and so has an interest in maximising the numbers to make its point. It says that average immigration into the USA since 1990 is 1 million a year, by far the highest it has ever been in the history of the US.
EurActiv.com Portal puts legal immigration into the EU at 680,000 a year. The two sites suggest that illegal immigration is comparable in both too.
This European statistics (figures from 1997) puts the number of US nationals living in the UK at 278,000 (with 9,000 in Ireland. I can't find how many UK nationals are resident in the US.
It looks to me as if the EU and US have pretty similar immigration numbers, given their respective populations (similar) and land space (more in the US). I don't know if the EU figures have been rising along with the US figures in the '90s or if the US has pulled ahead of the EU over that time, for whatever reasons.
Of course, the figures will be confused soon with the enlargement of the EU.