The United States is the world’s top destination for people moving from one country to another, and Mexico is the largest source of immigrants from a single country to the U.S.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Pew Research has crunched the data to show the shift in origin of immigrants, and how Mexico finally overtook Germany in the immigration race.
Germany dominated through the middle of the 20th Century, but that started to change once the Congress passed legislation in 1965 to open the borders.
For example, in 1910, Germany accounted for 18 percent of all immigrants and made up the biggest single group of immigrants in 17 states.
Today, Mexico is the single largest source if immigrants in 33 states; 50 percent of all immigrants in the United States are from Latin America, with 29 percent coming from Mexico.
