What % of US immigration is of high skilled people?

[Torie]

Good question!  I would like to see some figures on this. But whatever the figure is, I have no doubt I will find it too low.

[Torie]

Probably worth pointing out that the US has historically gone for the hard worker over the skilled worker. Teeming masses and whatnot. That's who made this country.

Those teeming masses tended to be the cream of the crop of those masses in the places from which they came. That was why, for example,  New England in the 19th century had the highest literacy rate in the world - going away.

[Torie]

The upper middle classes emigrated to US. In more favorable cases even upper classes(successful revolutions in Europe).

E.g., the German 48'ers (and all those bourgeoise folks fleeing the Commies). As to the potato famine Irish, the controversial Banfield, in the Unheavenly City, claimed that their blood lines largely died out (not much of a social safety net then, particularly for the loathed and the damned). The Irish we have today, asserted he, came starting in the 1850's (that decade that had the highest percentage of immigrant arrivals to total population of any decade in US history, including recent ones, and which tipped the balance of power against the South since nearly all of them settled north of the Mason Dixon Line (the South seceded too late as it were to get away with it).

[Torie]

Probably worth pointing out that the US has historically gone for the hard worker over the skilled worker. Teeming masses and whatnot. That's who made this country.

Those teeming masses tended to be the cream of the crop of those masses in the places from which they came. That was why, for example,  New England in the 19th century had the highest literacy rate in the world - going away.

New England's literacy success came from the local governments' response to the immigrants, not from the nature of the immigrants themselves.  First generation immigrants were generally just as low skilled and illiterate as illegals are today.  It was the huge influx in public education in hopes of speeding up the assimilation process which made it work.

You might check this out. My impression was that the rates were high because the immigrants were dissenters (a big percentage from East Anglica) who read the Bible. Sure as my link indicates, then public schools were pushed by the Yankees facing the new influx. One thing leads to another, and the Yankees did the same thing all over the Yankee diaspora through the northern parts of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa -with small colleges still heavily dotted over the landscape that have been there since the 19th century. My grandparents went to one of those schools, Simpson College in Iowa, following George Washington Carver whom my great grandmother nursed back to health over a summer, and then helped to arrange his admission there.