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The number of Israeli immigrants in the United States in 1990

  • National and International Migration
  • Published:
Demography

Abstract

In this paper we estimate the size of several categories of “Israeli” immigrants in the United States. According to the 1990 U.S. census, there were about 95,000 Israeli-born immigrants in the United States in that year. Using the language and ancestry information available in the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 1990 census, we estimate that of this total, about 80,000 are Jews and 15,000 are Palestinian Arabs born in Israel. In addition to the Israeli-born, we present a range for the number of Jewish immigrants from Israel who are not Israeli-born (about 30,000-56,000). Thus our estimate for the total number of Jewish immigrants from Israel in the United States in 1990 is between 110,000 and 135,000. Fertility information available in the PUMS, also enable us to provide estimates for the number of second-generation Israelis in the United States in the 1990 (about 42,000). Finally, using both the 1980 and 1990 PUMS, we provide estimates for the rate of return migration among Israeli-born Jewish immigrants in the United States.

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Correspondence to Yinon Cohen.

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This research was supported in part by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Golda Meir Institute. We thank Richard Barrett, Peter Gottschalk, Bill Gronfein, Pini Herman, Michael Hout, Robert Merton, Cordelia Reimers, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Karin Amit and Sigal Ohel-Schelach for their research assistance

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Cohen, Y., Haberfeld, Y. The number of Israeli immigrants in the United States in 1990. Demography 34, 199–212 (1997). https://doi.org/10.2307/2061699

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