How major demographic changes of Asian and Latino immigrants are transforming California

For nearly two decades, more Asians have immigrated to California than Latin Americans.

This trend, which takes into account documented and undocumented arrivals, has reshaped the immigrant experience in California in dramatic ways that are now coming into view.

In the workforce, California data are showing more high-skilled immigrants coming from Asia and fewer lower-skilled workers coming from Latin America.

The changing migration patterns are hitting regions in different ways: In Silicon Valley, 42% of Santa Clara County residents are now immigrants, with most coming from China and India. By contrast, Los Angeles County is about one-third immigrant with most still coming from Latin America.

“Most Californians have a kind of daily reality of living in a diverse state with people from a lot of different backgrounds,” Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said of the shift in immigration sources. “These changes are slow.”

The Trump wild card

The big question now is how President Trump’s border policies will affect these trends.

While Asian immigrants now outnumber Latino arrivals to California, that is not the case for the rest of the U.S., where Latinos from Central and South America still represent the largest immigrant group entering the country.

Demographic experts say Trump’s radical and controversial policies — if carried out — could accelerate the trend by further limiting immigration from the southern border while companies continue to use visas to get skilled workers from other countries.

Trump has promised the largest deportation of people here illegally in U.S. history, but it has yet to materialize. There are an estimated 11 million to 15 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., including more than 2 million in California. The Trump administration has also shut down a phone application used by migrants to legally enter the U.S. at the southern border.

As for the H-1B visa program, some Trump supporters have called on him to make changes, claiming the program gives high-skilled jobs to foreign-born workers and deprives Americans of those posts. The visas allow foreign-born computer scientists, engineers and other highly skilled workers to migrate to the United States, and tech titans close to Trump back H-1B. So far, the president appears to be siding with them.

But the futures of student and employment visas are uncertain, as the Trump administration presses colleges to reshape their policies and imposes widespread tariffs.

“If we go into an economic downturn,” tech jobs could dry up, and “it stands to reason that flows would go down,” Johnson said.

30 years of change

Johnson and others say the immigration trends have taken decades to fully play out but are becoming clearer in day-to-day life.

In 1990, 32% of California immigrants came from Asia and 56% came from Latin America, per census data reviewed by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The script flipped in 2007, Johnson said, but “it takes a while for the demographic changes to result in an overall impact on the population that is noticeable.” The majority of immigrants living in the state are still from Latin America, even though on an annual basis the flow of people coming across the border includes a greater percentage from Asia.

In 2022, 46% of California immigrants came from Asia, and 38% came from Latin America. European immigrants also made up a greater proportion of immigrants overall, going from 5.5% to 10% in the span.

Much of the influx was a result of the H-1B visa program, which brought nearly 79,000 skilled workers to California in 2024, per U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. The vast majority of these workers were sponsored by tech companies: Google, Meta and Apple were the top employers, accounting for more than 14,000 employees in total.

The vast majority of these visas went to Indian and Chinese citizens: In 2023, 73% of approved H-1B visas went to Indian people, and 12% went to Chinese residents, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Student visas also play a large role, as do family-based visas and petitions, said Connie Chung Joe, the chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. In the 2023-2024 school year, USC brought in 17,000 international students, while UC Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD each brought in more than 10,000, according to data from the U.S. Department of State. Twenty-nine percent of international students studying in America came from India that year, and 25% from China.

“The fastest-growing racial groups in Los Angeles, California and this country are Asian Americans,” she said.

Between July 2023 and 2024, California’s population grew by 48,881 people, per state Department of Finance data. The biggest contributor to the slim population growth was a net gain of 134,370 immigrants from abroad.

International migration offset losses within the U.S., where California lost almost 200,000 more people to other states than it gained from domestic migration.

‘A real big shift’

While tracking student and employer visas is relatively easy, it is harder to capture low-skill workers who “purposely try to stay below the radar,” Chung Joe said. Around 15% of Asian Americans in California are estimated to be undocumented, she said, and recent years have seen a surge of Asian migrants at the southern border.

Once they arrive, immigrants from a particular country sometimes settle in clusters — as with Chinese immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley, she said. But for many, the job market isn’t as easy. “What we’re seeing is quite a lot of movement because people are taking jobs wherever they can.”

Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California represents clients in lawsuits who are trafficked to other states to work low-paying jobs in warehouses or farms, Chung Joe said.

This new dynamic exists “primarily because net migration from Mexico of Mexicans has been negative for quite some time,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the USC Equity Research Institute.

Those crossing the border are from a greater variety of places than in the past, he said. “That’s been a real big shift.”

Asian immigrants make up a small but growing proportion of those crossing the border, per data from Customs and Border Patrol.

The rise of the visa holder in California

More recent immigrants to California are more highly educated than in the past, PPIC analysis shows. More than half of working-age immigrants arriving in the past 10 years had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 41% of Californians born in the U.S.

High-tech employment in the Bay Area is the biggest draw for this labor force.

The mix consists of H-1B visa holders, those who go through the system and undocumented immigrants. The census data on immigration do not include undocumented immigrants explicitly, but count them among the immigrant population as a whole.

“Highly educated immigrants often make high wages,” Pastor said. Many from South Asia, India, Taiwan and some large cities in China fall into this category.

Others, such as Hmong, Laotians and mainland Chinese tend to “have lower levels of education and make less money here,” he said.

“There’s a big diversity within the immigrant experience now,” whereas before “there was more uniformity,” Pastor said.

Asians will probably continue to be a majority because “high housing prices in California are chasing out lots of working-class residents, among them immigrants.” Pastor said many will be put off by the difficulty of affording the high cost of raising a family.

California depends on not just high-earning immigrants, however. The state’s labor force is highly dependent on low-wage workers who often come from abroad.

Culturally, too, the state depends on immigration, Pastor argued.

“If you want to go to a restaurant that serves good Chinese food, there might be low-paid Chinese people working in those restaurants,” he said. Attracting well-paid workers to California may also attract less highly paid workers from the same countries.