The following post first appeared on FactCheck.org.
Rick Santorum touted a shocking statistic to Iowa voters: Of the “6 million net new jobs created in America” since 2000, “all of them” are held by immigrants. That’s not accurate. Santorum ignores the 2.6 million job gains by native-born Americans over the age of 65 in the same time period.
Santorum also said, “We’re approaching percentage-wise the highest level of immigrants that we’ve ever had in America.” Perhaps, but we’re approaching it from a distance. The peak was in 1890, when 14.8 percent of the population was foreign-born. Census figures show 13.1 percent was foreign-born in 2013.
The former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who is preparing for a second presidential campaign made his claims on Jan. 24 at the Iowa Freedom Summit. On job creation, he said:
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U.S. Census figures show that 12.9 percent of the country’s population was foreign-born in 2010, and Census data from 2013 show that has edged up to 13.1 percent. That is close to the previous high, in 1920, when 13.2 percent of the population was foreign-born. But there were even higher percentages in the years before that.
The high point was in 1890, when 14.8 percent of the population was foreign-born. And in 1910, those who weren’t born in the U.S. made up 14.7 percent of the population.
In terms of raw numbers, there were 41 million foreign-born in the U.S. in 2013, and 46.7 percent of them were naturalized U.S. citizens, according to the Census. The estimated number of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally is 11.3 million, according to the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends project.
