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Chinese immigrants are the third-largest foreign-born group in the United States, after Mexicans and Indians. Chinese immigration to the United States has consisted of two waves, the first arriving in the mid-1800s and the second from the late 1970s to the present. The population has grown more than six-fold since 1980, reaching 2.3 million in 2016, or 5 percent of the approximately 44 million immigrant population overall.

Chinese migration to the United States picked up during the mid-19th century, when primarily male manual laborers arrived in the West Coast for agricultural, mining, railroad construction, and other low-skilled jobs. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, a political response to virulent anti-Chinese public attitudes and pressures from labor unions, severely limited future immigration of Chinese workers and barred Chinese residents from obtaining U.S. citizenship. Though the law was repealed in 1943, few mainland Chinese could immigrate due to other restrictions placed on non-European immigration in the 1920s.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, significant policy changes in the United States and China opened a new chapter of Chinese migration. These shifts included the 1965 Immigration Act in the United States that re-opened migration pathways for non-European immigrants and created temporary worker programs for skilled workers, as well as China’s loosening of its emigration controls in 1978, and the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979. The number of immigrants from mainland China in the United States nearly doubled from 299,000 in 1980 to 536,000 in 1990, and again to 989,000 in 2000, reaching 2.1 million in 2016.

Nationals of Hong Kong, a territory of the United Kingdom until 1997, were not subject to the same set of immigration limits as mainland Chinese citizens; they began moving to the United States in the late 1960s. By 1980, there were 85,000 Hong Kong-born immigrants in the United States, which increased to 212,000 by 2016, comprising about 9 percent of all Chinese immigrants.

Unlike in the 19th century, Chinese immigrants arriving post-1965 are predominantly skilled: China is now the principal source of foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education, and its nationals receive the second-largest number of employer-sponsored H-1B temporary visas, after India. Chinese immigrants are enrolled in college and graduate school at a rate more than twice that of immigrants overall (15 percent, compared to 7 percent). Chinese nationals are also overrepresented in applications for the EB-5 investor visa program, accounting for 90 percent of applicants in fiscal year (FY) 2015.

Sources: Data from U.S. Census Bureau 2010 and 2016 American Community Surveys (ACS), and 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census.

The United States is the top destination for Chinese immigrants, accounting for 22 percent of the nearly 11 million Chinese living outside of China, according to mid-2015 estimates by the United Nations Population Division. Other popular destinations include Canada (939,000), South Korea (751,000), Japan (652,000), Australia (547,000), and Singapore (511,000).

Click here to view an interactive map showing where migrants from China and other countries have settled worldwide.

Compared to the overall foreign- and native-born populations in the United States, Chinese immigrants on average are significantly better educated and are more likely to be employed in management positions. Thirty percent of Chinese immigrants who obtain lawful permanent residence in the United States (also known as getting a green card) do so through employment-based routes. The remainder qualify through family ties or as asylees.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau (the most recent 2016 American Community Survey [ACS] and pooled 2011-15 ACS data), the Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, and World Bank annual remittance data, this Spotlight provides information on the Chinese immigrant population in the United States, focusing on its size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics.