South American Immigrants in the United States
FEBRUARY 16, 2022
SPOTLIGHT
By Jane Lorenzi and Jeanne Batalova
Immigrants from South America comprise a small share of the total U.S. immigrant population. However, arrivals from the region have increased in recent years and flows are diversifying. Many of the 3.4 million South Americans living in the United States as of 2019 immigrated during the Cold War era, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Authoritarian regimes, poor economic conditions, and internal armed conflicts drove migration from countries including Argentina and Chile, and a shift in U.S. policies made immigration more feasible. In the 1990s and 2000s, social and economic crises fueled further departures from the region.
More recently, the United States has become an emerging destination for Venezuelans. Most of the nearly 6 million Venezuelans who make up Latin America’s largest exodus in recent years remain in other countries in South America, particularly Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador. However, economic devastation amid the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with changing political winds in some of these host countries has prompted a small but growing number of Venezuelans to move onward again, often towards the United States. The U.S. Border Patrol encountered Venezuelan nationals nearly 25,000 times at the U.S.-Mexico border in December 2021, a record high and 29-fold increase over December 2020. Similar economic factors have also driven emigration of nationals of other countries in the region, mainly Ecuador and Brazil.
Overall, South American immigrants in the United States represented close to 8 percent of the 44.9 million foreign born in the United States in 2019, up from 1 percent in 1960. They account for a fraction of all immigrants from Latin America, with populations from Mexico and Central America significantly larger.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-american-immigrants-united-states
