For nearly two decades, more Asians have immigrated to California than Latin Americans.
This trend, which takes into account documented and undocumented arrivals, has reshaped the immigrant experience in California in dramatic ways that are now coming into view.
In the workforce, California data are showing more high-skilled immigrants coming from Asia and fewer lower-skilled workers coming from Latin America.
The changing migration patterns are hitting regions in different ways: In Silicon Valley, 42 percent of Santa Clara County residents are now immigrants, with most coming from China and India. By contrast, Los Angeles County is about one-third immigrant with most still coming from Latin America.
“Most Californians have a kind of daily reality of living in a diverse state with people from a lot of different backgrounds,” Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said of the shift in immigration sources. “These changes are slow.”
The Trump Wild Card
The big question now is how President Donald Trump’s border policies will affect these trends.
While Asian immigrants now outnumber Latino arrivals to California, that is not the case for the rest of the U.S., where Latinos from Mexico and South America still represent the largest immigrant group entering the country.
Demographic experts say Trump’s radical and controversial policies — if carried out — could accelerate the trend by further limiting immigration from the southern border while companies continue to use visas to get skilled workers from other countries.
Trump has promised the largest deportation of people here illegally in the U.S. history, but it has yet to materialize. There are an estimated 11 million to 15 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., including more than 2 million in California. The Trump administration has also shut down a phone application used by migrants to legally enter the U.S. at the southern border.
As for the H-1B visa program, some Trump supporters have called on him to make changes, claiming the program gives high-skilled jobs to foreign-born workers and deprives Americans of those posts. The visas allow foreign-born computer scientists, engineers and other highly skilled workers to migrate to the United States, and tech titans close to Trump back H-1B. So far, the president appears to be siding with them.
But the futures of student and employment visas are uncertain, as the Trump administration presses colleges to reshape their policies and imposes widespread tariffs.
“If we go into an economic downturn,” tech jobs could dry up, and “it stands to reason that flows would go down,” Johnson said.
