ABSTRACT
Immigration into the United States from Latin America has increased dramatically in recent decades. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, by revoking the system of national origin quotas and making visas easier to obtain in general, contributed significantly to this trend. Whereas Latin Americans comprised only 26 percent of legal immigrants entering the United States from 1941 to 1950, 40 percent of legal immigrants from 1951 to 1960 were from Latin Amer ica (Passel and Edmonston 1994). Although Latinos continued to rep resent roughly 40 percent of legal immigrants through the 1980s (Pas sel and Edmonston 1994), the size of the legal immigrant flow from all countries increased from roughly 2.5 million people between 1951 and 1960 to over 7.3 million people from 1981 to 1990 (Borjas 1994). Thus, legal Latin American immigrants to the United States during the 1980s numbered almost 3 million. Legal immigration from Mex ico, the largest single source of immigrants to the United States, in creased from about 0.3 million people in the 1950s to almost 1.7 million during the 1980s (Borjas 1994). The flow of illegal immigrants has also consisted of an increasing share of Latinos. By 1980, Mexi cans alone represented approximately half of the nation’s estimated 2 -4 million undocumented immigrants (Warren and Passel 1987).
