After presenting my dad's immigration story in class I decided to look into Guatemala and how many people immigrated to the United States and it took me awhile to find anything because the majority talks about Mexico and "central america" it doesn't go into details about countries individually, but luckily I came across this website that talks about Central America and its migration.
"Since 1990, the number of Central American immigrants in the United States has nearly tripled. This immigrant population grew faster than any other region-of-origin population from Latin America between 2000 and 2010. Central American immigrants' share of the total immigrant population in the United States has also grown steadily for the past five decades, from less than 1 percent in 1960 to almost 8 percent in 2011."
A fact that caught my attention was that in 2011 the top three countries of origin for Central American immigrants were El Salvador(41%), Guatemala(28%) and Honduras(16%). Also about half of all Central American immigrants reside in three states: California, Texas and Florida. From the looks of this fact my parent migrated to one of these states which goes to show that immigrants must have some interest in these three states for the half that decide to reside in one of them.
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=938
That is interesting indeed. I would suppose that since those three areas have high percentages of spanish speakers that, that could be a motivator (besides economic opprotunity in those 3 states). I found an interesting article which focuses on some of the reason people from those three nations are leaving more than others in the region
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ycsg.yale.edu/center/forms/violence-central-america64-72.pdf