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by mlyle 1460 days ago
> Looking at what you linked, total immigrant population increased by 12 million from 1990 to 2000, 8 million from 2000 to 2010, but about 5 million from 2010 to 2019. Big dip.

Yes, the sharp hockey-stick rise of number of immigrants and their share of the population cannot go straight up forever. The only way immigrants can significantly increase in share of the population, while the population increases, is for net migration to be in excess of long-term historical averages. This is still happening today!

Up till COVID, legal immigration was still looking pretty healthy: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Ann...

This number isn't smooth, but the average is basically constrained by legislation. Note 1987-1991 is a special case after the 1987 and 1990 immigration acts provided for the normalization of the status of many illegal immigrants. Indeed, even the post-COVID number exceeds all years 1920-1988.

> Living in a country with massive demand for nurses that's being filled by immigrants, wages are plummeting. Demand still far exceeds supply.

Wages are so much higher than source countries (e.g. the Philippines) that -doctors- are frequently relocating and completing supplementary training to serve as nurses in the US. Remittances are 9% of GDP in the Philippines and the Philippines is building capacity to educate nurses that far exceeds internal demand; they have to go somewhere and compensation in the US outstrips other options. The number of immigrants in nursing is artificially restricted by immigration quotas.

Indeed, nursing wages are so high in the US compared to other US professions that demand outstrips supply of nursing education for domestically educated nurses.