Lax US border security and civil war in Central America have resulted in a massive influx of Salvadorean immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years.
One-fifth of the population of El Salvador now live in the United States.
Migration Policy reported:
Between 1980 and 1990, the Salvadoran immigrant population in the United States increased nearly fivefold from 94,000 to 465,000. The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that hit El Salvador, including earthquakes and hurricanes.
By 2008, there were about 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. Salvadorans are the country’s sixth largest immigrant group after Mexican, Filipino, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese foreign born.
The immigrant population from this tiny Central American country is now nearly as large as the immigrant population from much larger China. (As reference, China’s total population is 200 times larger and its territory is about 500 times larger than El Salvador’s.)
More than half of all Salvadoran immigrants resided in just two states, California and Texas, although they are also concentrated in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia (for more information on immigrants by state, see the ACS/Census Data tool on the MPI Data Hub)…
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