By Missoula Current
On this day when we all, ostensibly, are from Ireland, we thought you’d enjoy seeing the actual source of immigrants to the United States – and how that has changed over the years. The Pew Research Center provided these maps.
Ireland was, in fact, the largest source of immigration to Montana in 1870. But since then, it’s been all United Kingdom and, in recent years, Canada. And that’s not likely to change for the foreseeable future.
Since 1965, when Congress passed legislation to open the nation’s borders, immigrants have largely hailed from Latin America and Asia.
According to the Pew Center: “Among U.S. immigrants as of 2013, five times as many are from Mexico as from China, where the second-highest number of U.S. immigrants were born (6 percent of all immigrants in the U.S., or 2.4 million). Mexico is the birthplace of 28 percent (or 11.6 million) of all immigrants in the U.S.”