Almost half of the foreign-born who moved to the U.S. in the past decade were college-educated, a level of education greatly exceeding immigrants from previous decades, as the arrival of highly skilled workers supplanted workers in fields like construction that shrunk after the Great Recession.

A number of “push and pull” factors, some decades in the making, were responsible. What resulted were drops in immigration from Latin America and increases in Asian immigrants who tended to be better educated, experts said.

Immigration from Latin American has been declining for more than a decade, and in the past several years it has even reversed itself with regard to Mexicans, who up until a dozen years ago were the greatest source of new immigrants in the U.S. Plummeting fertility rates in Mexico starting two decades ago shrunk the number of young job-seekers who would have headed north to the U.S., and the Great Recession a dozen years ago and its aftermath caused the disappearance of jobs in some industries like construction that were attractive to workers with little formal education, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside.

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