DALLAS — Siddharth Jaganath wanted to return to India after earning his master’s degree at Southern Methodist University. Instead, he built a new life in the U.S. over a decade, becoming a manager at a communications technology company.
“You start growing your roots and eventually end up staying here,” the 37-year-old said.
His path is an increasingly common one: Immigrants from China and India, many with student or work visas, have overtaken Mexicans as the largest groups coming into the U.S., according to U.S Census Bureau research released in May. The shift has been building for more than a decade, and experts say it’s bringing more highly skilled immigrants here.
Mexicans still dominate the overall composition of immigrants in the U.S., accounting for more than a quarter of the foreign-born people. But of the 1.2 million newly arrived immigrants here legally and illegally counted in the 2013 census, China led with 147,000, followed by India with 129,000 and Mexico with 125,000. It’s a sharp contrast to the 2000 census, which counted 402,000 from Mexico and no more than 84,000 each from India and China. The national trend is evident even in Texas, where the number of Mexican immigrants coming to the border state each year has dropped by more than half since 2005, according to the Office of the State Demographer.
