Foreign immigration to the Bay Area rose for the first time in five years

English

Foreign immigration to the San Francisco Bay Area is on the rise again after a five-year decline, according to recently released data.

Between July 2021 and June 2022, more than 21,000 foreign immigrants arrived in the Bay Area. This reversed the previous year’s trend, with nearly 600 more immigrants leaving the region than they had arrived.

The numbers were released by the California Department of Finance’s Demographic Research Division, which uses July 1 of each year as a benchmark. They represent “net” immigration to the state, that is, how many more people immigrated to the region than left the camp for other countries.

The data most accurately tracks people who immigrate through the legal visa process. The Treasury data also includes a rough estimate of illegal immigration using decennial census data, but does not reflect the exact annual fluctuations of this type of migration.

During the first waves of the pandemic in 2020, the federal government put in place strict controls that restricted immigration and many US embassies closed their doors to previously submitted visa applications, explained Phuong Nguyen, a demographic researcher at the Treasury Department who analyzed the data. Meanwhile, universities across the Bay Area and across the country have closed their dorms and switched to remote learning. This forced many foreign students to return home.

This combination of factors has resulted in the region’s only negative total foreign immigration in the last decade. The abrupt cessation of immigration, combined with explosive migration from the Bay Area, was a major factor in contributing to San Francisco’s first population decline in years.

But in 2022, the US reopened the door. Embassies have processed visas again and face-to-face classes have resumed for many international students, Nguyen said, leading to an increase in foreign immigration to the Bay Area. The local surge in immigration mirrors the rest of the state and the nation as a whole.

The data shows that even before Covid hit, net immigration to the Bay Area has steadily declined since its peak in 2016. This is due to a series of Trump administration policies restricting immigration to the US, Nguyen said.

California welcomed over 162,000 immigrants in 2016, but that figure has dropped to around 123,000 in 2019.

Immigration is not distributed evenly across the Gulf. Santa Clara County led the region with about 6,000 immigrants between July 2021 and June 2022. That’s 25 times more than Napa County, which had fewer than 250 people.

Santa Clara County is home to Silicon Valley and Stanford University, both of which attract people from all over the world, resulting in high immigration rates, Nguyen explained. UC Berkeley also attracts a huge number of international students to Alameda County, and San Francisco has long been a hub for people coming from overseas to start a new life in the US.

All three major immigration destinations in the Bay Area in 2022 have some of the region’s highest rates of foreign-born residents. More than a third of residents in San Mateo, San Mateo, and Alameda counties were born overseas, with the figure as high as 40% in Santa Clara County.

President Biden lifted many of his predecessor’s immigration restrictions. As the Department of Homeland Security clears its pandemic-era backup of documents, California’s total immigrant population is likely to continue rising to pre-Trump administration levels, Nguyen predicts.

Meanwhile, U.S. Border Patrol agents have faced a record high number of migrants trying to enter the states from Mexico, another sign that immigration to California and the rest of the country could continue to rise in the months and years ahead.

A rise in the total number of immigrants could bode well for San Francisco supporters who want the city to return to the population growth seen in the 2010s. Immigration has long been the driving force behind the city’s population growth.

English