WASHINGTON — Legal immigration to the United States, fueled by a decade of changes in immigration law and dominated by Latin American and Asian arrivals, surged 27% in 1996, with 915,900 foreigners receiving visas to come to or remain in the country permanently.
Following a pattern that has lasted 25 years, California was the intended residence cited most often by those who won green cards to remain in the United States last year, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which released the annual statistics Tuesday. At the same time, the state's share of all legal immigrants appears to be diminishing gradually, from almost 26% in 1994 to 22% in 1996. After California, the states cited most frequently by immigrants as intended residences were New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey and Illinois.
Mexico was, by far, the most common point of origin, with 18% of those getting green cards last year coming from there.
The 1996 hike in legal immigration follows three years in which the ranks of green card-holding newcomers had dropped by a total of 20%. Tuesday's report set off a storm of debate over the causes and significance of the spurt and the wisdom of the policy changes that have contributed to it.
Clinton administration officials played down the significance of the reported increase, attributing much of it to a speed-up in the processing of visa applications. INS officials cautioned Tuesday that the increase in immigration rates likely will last another two to three years before returning to 1995 levels of about 720,000 people per year.
They also emphasized that many of the "new" legal immigrants reflected in the latest count actually have been in the United States for some time, having come to the country in recent years to await visa approval.
Some of the 1996 increase stems from a 1994 change in immigration law that eased penalties for immigrants who come to the United States illegally pending approval of a green-card application. These newcomers usually come to join family members who will sponsor them. The change prompted a steep increase in applications by such immigrants and it took the INS two years to process the backlog. As a result, experts said, many immigrants whose legal status should have been reflected in the 1994 and 1995 statistics are artificially inflating the 1996 numbers.
