Immigration Is Remaking America. Is That What We Want?

This Pew Report quantifies the explosive impact that immigration, legal and illegal, is having on the United States. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Ted Kennedy-inspired Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This simple chart shows the consequences of the unprecedented wave of immigration that followed passage of the act:

The Pew report notes that the impact of the 1965 act was not widely foreseen:

At the time, relatively few anticipated the size or demographic impact of the post-1965 immigration flow. In absolute numbers, the roughly 59 million immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1965 and 2015 exceed those who arrived in the great waves of European-dominated immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Between 1840 and 1889, 14.3 million immigrants came to the U.S., and between 1890 and 1919, an additional 18.2 million arrived.

Americans are not convinced that the current immigration explosion is a good thing. Large pluralities say it has hurt the economy and caused increased crime...

the sheer numbers are staggering. Pew calculates that without the post-1965 wave of immigration, the population of the United States would be 72 million fewer than it is today. By 2065, Pew projects an additional 103 million, on top of the 72 million:

That number–175 million–is more than the populations of all but five of the world’s countries. As a friend likes to ask, when did we vote for this?