Pew Research Center
Month
Pew Research Center has been studying the Millennial generation for more than a decade. But by 2018, it became clear to us that it was time to determine a cutoff point between Millennials and the next generation. Turning 38 this year, the oldest Millennials are well into adulthood, and they first entered adulthood before today’s youngest adults were born.
In order to keep the Millennial generation analytically meaningful, and to begin looking at what might be unique about the next cohort, Pew Research Center decided a year ago to use 1996 as the last birth year for Millennials for our future work. Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 23 to 38 in 2019) is considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward is part of a new generation.
Since the oldest among this rising generation are just turning 22 this year, and most are still in their teens or younger, we hesitated at first to give them a name – Generation Z, the iGeneration and Homelanders were some early candidates. (In our first in-depth look at this generation, we used the term “post-Millennials” as a placeholder.) But over the past year, Gen Z has taken hold in popular culture and journalism.
Ten years ago, Barack Obama took office as the first black president of the United States – a proud moment for many Americans. Obama’s election represented another advance in the slow but steady progress blacks have made in recent decades in gaining a greater foothold in political leadership, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Cabinets of recent presidents. But they have lagged in the Senate and in governorships.
Data from the past 50 years reveal the upward yet uneven trajectory of black political leadership in America. In 1965, there were no blacks in the U.S. Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only six members of the House of Representatives were black. As of 2019, there is greater representation in some areas – 52 House members are black, putting the share of black House members (12%) on par with the share of blacks in the U.S. population overall for the first time in history. But in other areas, there has been little change (there are three black senators and no black governors).
As Trump and Democrats press their cases about ways to end the government shutdown, here’s a look at how Americans see illegal immigration – as well as their views toward the president’s proposed expansion of the border wall and how much political leaders should be open to compromise:
1. The vast majority of immigrants in the U.S. are in the country legally – but fewer than half of Americans know that’s the case. Lawful immigrants accounted for about three-quarters (76%) of all immigrants in the U.S. in 2016. But in a survey conducted in June 2018, only 45% of Americans correctly said most immigrants are in the country legally. Around a third of U.S. adults (35%) incorrectly said that most immigrants are in the country illegally, while 6% said about half of all immigrants are here illegally and half legally. Another 13% did not provide a response.
2. Republican and Democratic voters sharply disagree over whether illegal immigration is a major problem in the U.S. today. In a survey conducted ahead of last year’s midterm elections, three-quarters of registered voters who planned to support the GOP candidate in their congressional district said illegal immigration was a very big problem in the country, versus just 19% among voters who planned to support their Democratic candidate for Congress.
Men are overrepresented in online image search results across a majority of 105 jobs studied in a recent analysis, while women are underrepresented relative to their actual participation rates in those jobs. When women appear, they appear lower in search results than men.
When the 116th Congress convenes next month, women will make up nearly a quarter of its voting membership – the highest percentage in U.S. history. Women will account for 38% of all House Democrats and 36% of Senate Democrats, compared with 8% of House Republicans and 15% of Senate Republicans.
Online media organizations, social media sites and individuals add vast quantities of images to the web each day. These images can then appear in search engines as users look for pictures representing common phrases or topics. Because the way that men and women are represented in these online search results might be connected to the way people understand gender and society, some academic researchers have specifically focused on the ways women and men are depicted in the workplace in online images.
A new Pew Research Center study extends this line of research by using a computational method – machine vision to analyze a broad sample of images from Google Image Search that depict men and women working common jobs, and then comparing those results with real-world data about the gender composition of the U.S. workforce. The study finds that the share of each gender pictured varies widely across the spectrum of careers tested. But in the majority of jobs examined, women are somewhat underrepresented in online images relative to their actual participation rates in those jobs in the United States, based on 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Across all individuals shown in the search results, men appear 60% of the time. And, when women appear, they appear lower in the search results than men.
Immigration is a rich, complex topic that is front and center in public debates. We’ve boiled down much of what we know about immigration into a series of five emails, each answering a different question about this multifaceted topic. Sign up today to learn about:
There were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2016, representing 3.3% of the total U.S. population that year. The 2016 unauthorized immigrant total is a 13% decline from the peak of 12.2 million in 2007, when this group was 4% of the U.S. population.
The number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants declined since 2007, but the total from other nations changed little. Mexicans made up half of all unauthorized immigrants in 2016, according to Pew Research Center’s estimate, compared with 57% in 2007. Their numbers (and share of the total) have been declining in recent years: There were 5.4 million Mexican unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, down from 6.9 million in 2007.
Meanwhile, the total from other nations, 5.2 million in 2016, remained about the same as in 2007, when it was 5.3 million. The number of unauthorized immigrants has grown since 2007 only from one birth region: Central America, from 1.5 million that year to nearly 1.9 million in 2016. This growth was fueled mainly by immigrants from the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The totals also went down over the 2007-2016 period from South America and the combined region of Europe plus Canada. The remaining regions (the Caribbean, Asia, Middle East-North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world) did not change significantly in that time.
America’s global image today is complicated. On balance, people around the world continue to give the United States favorable ratings and say it respects the individual liberties of its people. More countries also prefer the U.S. as the world’s leading power over China. At the same time, many express frustration about America’s role in the world and say they have little confidence in President Donald Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 25 nations.
Here are nine charts that show how people in these countries see the U.S. and its president:
Western Europeans have strikingly negative views of Trump. In the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain – four nations the Center has consistently surveyed over the past 15 years – there is a clear pattern in public perceptions of U.S. presidents. People in these countries generally had little confidence in President George W. Bush to do the right thing regarding world affairs. Their confidence was much higher in Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, but it plunged following Trump’s election in 2016. This year, confidence in Trump remains low in Germany, France and Spain – but it is up slightly in the UK. Of the 25 countries surveyed, a median of 70% lack confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs.
Views of the U.S. are favorable on balance, but concerns are evident. Across the 25 countries surveyed, a median of 50% have a favorable opinion of the U.S., while 43% have an unfavorable view. Likewise, a median of 51% say the U.S. respects the personal freedoms of its people, compared with 37% who say it does not. However, there is international concern about America’s role in world affairs. Large majorities say the U.S. doesn’t take the interests of other countries into account when making foreign policy decisions. Also, a global median of 37% believe the U.S. is doing less to help address major global problems than it used to.
Immigration is a rich, complex topic that is front and center in public debates. If you combed through the Pew Research Center archives, you’d find that we have published hundreds of reports and blog posts about immigration in recent years.
Our researchers have distilled much of what we know about immigration into a five-part email mini-course. You’ll receive an email every few days over the span of a couple of weeks. As with all of our work, it’s free. Learn more here.