Latin American Immigrants

In 1950, the populations of the United States and of Latin America were the same, at 150 million citizens. Yet forty-five years later, Latin America had tripled in population size, reaching 450 million eleven years before the United States reached 300 million. This exceptional growth rate was achieved because as Latin America's infant mortality rate dropped and life expectancy increased, their birth rate stayed at the same high rate. This combination repopulated the region at a significant pace and is the reason their population grew so much faster than the population of the United States. Latin American population is concentrated heavily around its larger cities, with an average of approximately twenty times more people per area in a city
More citizens are leaving than are entering. Many of these Latin American immigrants settle in the United States and send home remittances every month to their families who stayed behind. This money amount peaked in 2008, just before the financial crisis, with seventy billion dollars being sent from new immigrants back home. Five years later, the remittance number was around sixty billion dollars, still a considerable sum. Latin Americans are on the move. More than 54 million people of Hispanic descent live in the United States. Yet the United States are only one destination for these Latin American emigrants. The route from Latin America to Italy, Japan, Portugal, or Spain are all well-traveled. Even among those who remain in Latin America, many are migrating to new regions and cities. In the 1960s, Brazil built several new highways into the Amazon to encourage frontier colonization. Today, five times as many people live in the Amazon as did in the 1960s. Latin America has the potential to see monumental growth in the near future, as over a quarter of the population is under the age of fifteen. As this new generation grows and matures, Latin America will be populated with the new ideas and values of her young