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Abstract

What role has immigration played in crafting the current demographic fabric of the United States? What will future flows of the foreign-born mean for the future makeup of the country? To what degree are new foreign-born arrivals to the United States becoming citizens, a key indicator of integration? What does citizenship mean for immigrants and the country in the digital age? Answers to these and other related questions are central to understand immigration policy reform in the United States. Blending public-use data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), this paper presents a snapshot of demographic profiles and trends among the foreign-born (immigrant) population in the United States. The paper also examines U.S. naturalization patterns as an indicator of civic integration of the foreign-born and discusses a set of barriers to naturalization within the framework of new scholarship on "digital citizenship." The paper concludes by exploring several of the key implications of these findings by sketching two divergent potential immigration and citizenship policy pathways.

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