WASHINGTON AND LOS ANGELES — More than three decades of rapid growth in the country's foreign-born population came to a halt last year, census data show, as surging unemployment made the U.S. economy less attractive to outsiders.
In California, which has a long history of attracting immigrants, the number of foreign-born residents actually declined, shrinking 1.6%.
"This is clearly a consequence of the economy, with the biggest impact on Mexican and low-skilled immigrants," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census figures, which are to be officially released today. "It shows that these immigrants respond to the economy."
Nationwide, the number of foreign-born residents fell an estimated 99,000, or 0.3%, to 37.97 million.
The data come from the Census Bureau's annual survey of about 3 million Americans, not the entire population. The survey's margin of sampling error is high enough to make it possible that the number of foreign-born people in the country actually remained unchanged from 2007 to 2008 rather than declined.
Nonetheless, the figures suggest a dramatic break from a long wave of increasing migration to the U.S., particularly from Asia and Latin America, that followed a major change in immigration policy in 1965.
In the two decades that preceded 2008, the country's foreign-born population grew an average of almost 1 million a year, including by nearly 512,000 in 2007.
In California, the number of foreign-born people dropped 165,000 last year to 9.9 million. The reversal in the state was driven by several Southern California counties with sharp declines, such as Los Angeles, with a slide of 3%, San Bernardino, down 3.6%, and Ventura, down 4.1%. Orange and Riverside counties showed smaller decreases.
But the slowing of the increase in California's foreign-born population began well before the latest recession, said Dowell Myers, a professor and urban demographer at USC.
In the 1980s, for example, many immigrants targeted California because of their family and cultural ties to the state's already established immigrant communities. But during the aerospace-led downturn of the early 1990s, immigrants began moving more throughout the country, where they found employment more plentiful and housing more affordable.
"Now, they have contacts across America who say, 'Hey, I can get you a job and a house for one-third the price,' " Myers said.
