How USA’s Legal Immigrants Got In (By Visa Type)

How Did They Get In?
(By type of visa.)
Here it is:

Legal Immigrants into the USA by type of residency permission acquired, 2009
627,358	[41.3%]	Family-Based Visas (“Chain Migrants”)
317,129	[20.9%]	Spousal visas (Married to a U.S. citizen or engaged to one [fiancee visa])
148,165	[9.7%]	Children (and their spouses/children) of citizens
98,567	[6.5%]	Immediate family of alien permanent residents
63,397	[4.2%]	Siblings (and their immediate families) of citizens
375,249	[24.7%]	All Non-Family-Based Avenues
177,368	[11.7%]	Refugees and Asylum admittees
144,034	[9.5%]	Employment visas
47,879	[3.1%]	Diversity visas
5,968	[0.4%]	Other
518,311	[34.1%]	Illegals, Legalized
~390,000	[25.6%]	Babies born to Illegal Immigrants, automatically given citizenship
128,311	[8.4%]	Illegal immigrant parents legalized thanks to U.S.-born child (“anchor baby”)
1,520,818		TOTAL foreigners given legal status by the USA, 2009

Comments: Some would say “we need to reduce immigration”. This chart reveals that doing so is impossible, without revoking the 1965 Immigration Act. Few people today know that the Act simply allowed citizens to bring-in their relatives: the beginning of chain-migration. There is no way to regulate this: If they petition to bring in a relative, that relative is getting in, almost every time…

.
Notes:
Note #1: Data on residency-permission is from the U.S. Federal government, here (.xls). Data on births to illegal immigrants is from CIS: 9.5% of U.S. births are to illegal-alien mothers; there were 4.11-million births in 2009.

Note #2: These figures include both new arrivals and those foreigners in the USA receiving “adjustment of status” to permanent-residency.

Note #3: The final category in this chart (“Illegal immigrant parents legalized”) is a combination of two categories reported by DHS: “Parents of Citizens” and “Cancellations of Removal”. The latter category is for those up for deportation who show they have a U.S. citizen child, and thus that deportation would be a hardship on the child. It is presumed that the great majority of “parents of citizens” being given permanent-resident status are connected to anchor-babies.