Oct. 15 (UPI) — Half of adults in the United States are more concerned than excited about the rise of artificial intelligence, at the top of the worries list of those surveyed in 25 countries by Pew Research.
The study, which was released Wednesday, didn’t include respondents from the following nations with populations of at least 100 million: China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Philippines, Congo and Vietnam.
Globally, 34% expressed concern about AI with 42% equally in both extremes and 16% more excited.
Joining the United States at 50% are those in Italy, followed by Australia at 49%, Brazil at 48%, Greece at 47%, and Canada at 45%.
At the other end, South Korea is the least concerned at 16%, followed by India at 19%, Israel at 21%, Nigeria at 24%, Turkey at 26%, Japan at 28% and Germany at 29%.
The other nations ranged in the 30s, including Britain, Argentina and Spain at 39% and France at 35%.
In none of the countries, no more than 3-in-10 adults say they are mainly excited.
In the United States, the survey was conducted among 3,605 adults from March 24 to 30 and 5,023 adults from June 9 to 15 online or by phone with a live interviewer. They are all members of the Center’s American Trends Panel.
For non-U.S. adults, surveys were done over the phone, face-to-face or online, depending on the country, among 28,333 from Jan. 8 to April 26.
A median of 34% of adults worldwide have heard or read a lot about AI, while 47% have heard a little and 14% say they’ve heard nothing at all.
There was a correlation between the country’s domestic product per capita and AI awareness.
In the comparatively wealthy countries of Japan, Germany, France and the United States, around half have heard a lot about AI, but only 14% in India and 12% in Kenya.
Younger adults are more aware and excited about AI than the older respondents.
For example, 46% of Israeli adults under 35 are more excited than concerned about its increased use in daily life, compared with 15% of those ages 50 and older.
In more than half of the countries surveyed, men are more likely than women to have heard a lot about AI.
People who frequently use the Internet are more likely than others to be mainly excited about the growing use of AI .
Geographically, 53% of adults trust the European Union to regulate AI, while 37% trust the U.S. and 27% trust China. In the EU, the survey found those in France, Greece, Italy and Poland the least trusting.
Oct. 8 (UPI) — Parents are struggling to manage their children’s heavy use of screens, including television, computers, phones and gaming devices, according to a Pew Research survey.
When asked how they are managing the use of screen time, 42% say they could do a better job with 58% believing they are doing the best they can, according to the survey released Wednesday.
Thirty-nine percent said they believe they are stricter about their children’s screen time than other parents they know.
Parents have more priority over other daily routines. Pew found 42% make sure screen time is reasonable with 76% believing enough sleep is a priority, 77% good manners, 61% staying active and 54% reading.
The survey was conducted May 13-26 among 3,054 eligible parents sampled from the American Trends Panel, Pew Research Center’s nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults.
Separately, four online focus groups were also conducted from March 4 to 6 with a total of 20 U.S. parents or guardians of at least one child 1 to 12.
“I think eventually we will give it to them, but now … she’s not ready,” one parent said. “We spend too much time on phones. … How can we expect a 9-year-old to control and have a balance between their screen time?”
“I also have three other children in the house, and I work full time,” another parent said. “To just keep some of my sanity, the first thing I do is turn the TV on. … Being the wintertime, it’s hard for them to go outside. … I want to work on the screen time for the summertime.”
A vast majority of children 12 or younger have access to devices — 90% for TV, 68% for tablets, 61% for smartphones, 50% for gaming devices, 39% for desktops or laptops, 37% for voice-activated assistants, 11% for smartwatches and 8% for AI chatbots.
In the survey, 82% said they allow a child younger than 2 to watch TV.
Involving smartphones, 76% of parents say their 11- or 12-year-old uses one, 64% of those 8-10, 58% 5-7 and actually higher 59% ages 2 to 4. Thirty-eight percent of their child younger than 2 ever use or interact\ with one.
A total of 23% say their child has their own smartphone. Broken down, it’s 57% those 11-12, 29% for 8-10, 12% for 5-7 and 8% younger than 5.
Among specific content, 85% of parents said their child ever Watches YouTube, including 51% daily. In 2020, it was 80% for children 11 and younger.
And 15% said their children 12 and younger use TikTok, 8% Snapchat, 5% each Facebook and Instagram. They are using these platforms even though companies have put age restrictions in place.
Eighty percent say social media harms outweigh the benefits, though 46% say a smartphone is more harmful and 20% for tablets.
Parents surveyed explained why they let their children use cellphones: 92% to contact them, 85% for entertainment, 69% to help in learning, 43% to calm them down and 30% so they don’t feel left out.
Pew found there are only slight differences in views for Republican and Democratic parents.
The Pew Research Center estimates the undocumented population in the U.S. has grown substantially since 2021.
A new study from the Pew Research Center released Thursday shows that the number of unauthorized immigrants — the organization’s terminology for undocumented people — reached an all-time high of 14 million people in 2023. That’s up 3.5 million from 2021, which marks the largest two-year jump the center has recorded.
Pew has sub-categorized unauthorized immigrants in two groups: those with deportation protections and those without.
“There are some people who enter the country without authorization and have remained in that status since,” the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew, Mark Hugo Lopez, told The Times. “There are others who may have come to the U.S. legally — for example on an H-1B visa — but their visa expired, they overstayed their visa and are now also classified as unauthorized immigrants, even though they entered the country legally.”
Lopez went on to explain that there’s another subset: people who entered the country without authorization but are granted a number of exemptions, particularly temporary protection from deportation through different programs. This includes people like those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or those who are in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Unauthorized immigrants with protections were largely responsible for the increase from 2021 to 2023, Pew found.
Overall, unauthorized immigrants made up 27% of the total foreign-born population in the U.S. in 2023, with 8 million having no protections and 6 million having some level of protection.
When it came to families with mixed status, most children — 4.6 million out of 6.1 million — living with an unauthorized immigrant parent are U.S. citizens.
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In regard to the U.S. workforce, unauthorized immigrants made up 5.6% of the national workforce. In California, unauthorized immigrants made up 8% of the statewide workforce by 2023.
One aspect of the research that stood out to Lopez the most was the shift in where immigrants to the U.S. are coming from, even if the country with the most people coming to the States remains the same.
“Unauthorized immigrants from Mexico are still the single largest group of unauthorized immigrants, but there are immigrants coming from many other parts of the world: from China, from India, from countries in Africa, from other parts of Latin America, including Venezuela,” Lopez noted.
Though the results of the latest Pew report focused on in-depth research of data from 2021 to 2023, the center acknowledged the new state of affairs for unauthorized immigrants over the last two years.
“The Trump administration, and the Biden administration as well, has changed who has protections and those who don’t,” Lopez said. “One large group — those in the CHNV program — had temporary protections from deportations and even permits to work in the United States temporarily. However, the Trump administration has revoked those protections, and now those immigrants are are no longer protected from possible deportation.”
Based on statistics from the Department of Homeland Security and other available government data, Pew estimates that the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population probably continued to increase through mid-2024. With the start of the new year and new presidency in 2025, Pew estimates that the unauthorized immigrant population probably declined by quite possibly as much as 1 million people. Despite that falloff, it is still believed that — as of July 2025 — the unauthorized immigrant population “almost surely” remains higher than in July 2023.
In January 2025, the census estimated the U.S. foreign-born population at an all-time high of 53.3 million people (15.8% of the total U.S. population). The agency’s data showed a decline during the first six months of 2025 and by June 2025, the foreign-born population was 51.9 million — a drop of 1.5 million people from its peak in January.
That change in data may be attributed to several different factors, Lopez pointed out.
“That may be a real decline, but it also may be that perhaps what we are seeing is a change in the way people are responding to the survey,” he said. “Or perhaps people are not responding to the survey at all, which may have an impact on our estimate of how many immigrants live in the country.”
Regarding the effect of self-deportations on the overall immigrants population in the U.S., Lopez said there is currently no data available to Pew that can definitively point to how much that process has affected the population.
“People make decisions to return to their home countries or maybe go to another country to pursue opportunities, whether economic or otherwise,” he explained. “So the idea of a particular self-deportation is really more that maybe people were choosing to leave and they’ve left in the last few months and it has more to do with their own opportunities or other decisions. While it would be great to know whether or not self-deportation has happened and how much so, we need more data to be able to give a precise estimate for that.”
With many uncertainties regarding potential future difficulties in gathering demographic information, Lopez acknowledged that Pew will have to adapt to the times.
“It is possible that we may have to make further adjustments to our estimate to capture undercount and other challenges in collecting data about immigrants and particularly unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.,” he said.
Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are driving even U.S. citizens away
“Are we even safe as American citizens?” asked L.A. resident Julie Ear in a video interview with The Times’ Diana Ramirez Santacruz — citing instances in which U.S. citizens have been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “ Even though we were born here, we don’t know if we’re gonna be safe long term.”
This year, Ear documented her mother’s self-deportation at the Tijuana airport in a TikTok video that has garnered 9.3 million views.
Longtime Angeleno Nicole Macias applied for dual Mexican citizenship last year and has since turned to social media to educate others about the dual citizenship process.
“The political climate right now in Los Angeles is really crazy. A lot of people just feel unsafe,” Macias told The Times. “A lot of people are turning back to this idea of being able to go back to Mexico and have an easier lifestyle.”
In the wake of ICE raids in L.A., artists band together for immigrants
Curator Love, Este Hogar no le abre la puerta a I.C.E.
(Amelia Tabullo)
De Los contributing writer Sarah Quiñones Wolfson wrote about how members of the L.A. arts community are using their work to raise funds to support immigrants in the city.
Quiñones Wolfson spoke with a slew of artists whose work depicts and benefits the L.A.’s vibrant and vital immigrant populations. Included in the article are striking photos of the previously mentioned artwork with a message.
In the piece, Erika Hirugami — an academic curator and founder of the immigrant-focused art enterpriseCuratorLove — introduced me to the inclusive phrase “undocplus” (also spelled “undoc+”) which refers to formerly or currently undocumented people, emphasizing a shared lived experience.
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Immigration and the border
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(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
For the first time in more than half a century, immigrants leaving the U.S. outnumber those arriving, a phenomenon that may signal President Trump’s historic mass deportation efforts are having the intended effect.
An analysis of census data released by Pew Research Center on Thursday noted that between January and June, the United States’ foreign-born population had declined by more than a million people.
Millions of people arrived at the border between 2021 and 2023 seeking refuge in America after the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, which ravaged many of their home countries. In 2023, California was home to 11.3 million immigrants, roughly 28.4% of the national total, according to Pew.
In January, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the U.S., the highest number recorded, but in the months that followed, those who left or were deported surpassed those arriving — the first drop since the 1960s. As of June, the number living in the U.S. had dropped to 51.9 million. Pew did not calculate how many immigrants are undocumented.
Trump and his supporters have applauded the exodus, with the president declaring “Promises Made. Promises Kept,” in a social media post this month.
“Seven months into his second term, it’s clear that the president has done what he said he’d do by reestablishing law and order at our southern border and by removing violent illegal immigrants from our nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a USA Today column on Thursday. “Both actions were necessary for Americans’ peace and prosperity.”
But some experts caution that such declines will have negative economic effects on the United States if they continue, resulting in labor shortages as America’s birth rate continues to drop.
“Looking ahead in the future, we’re going to have to rely on immigrant workers to fulfill a lot of the jobs in this country,” said Victor Narro, project director at UCLA Labor Center. “Like it or not, the demographics are going to be changing in this country. It’s already changing, but it’s going to be more pronounced in the future, especially with the decline in native-born workers.”
The Pew analysis highlights several policy changes that have affected the number of immigrants in the country, beginning during then-President Biden’s term.
In June 2024, Biden signed a proclamation that bars migrants from seeking asylum along the U.S. border with Mexico at times when crossings are high, a change that was designed to make it harder for those who enter the country without prior authorization.
Trump, who campaigned on hard-line immigration policies, signed an executive order on the first day of his second term, declaring an “invasion” at the southern border. The move severely restricted entry into the country by barring people who arrive between ports of entry from seeking asylum or invoking other protections that would allow them to temporarily remain in the U.S.
Widespread immigration enforcement operations across Southern California began in June, prompting pushback from advocates and local leaders. The federal government responded by deploying thousands of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. after the raids sparked scattered protests.
Homeland Security agents have arrested 4,481 undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area since June 6, the agency said this month.
Narro said the decrease in immigrants outlined in the study may not be as severe as the numbers suggest because of a reduction in response rates amid heightened enforcement.
“When you have the climate that you have today with fear of deportation, being arrested or detained by ICE — all the stuff that’s coming out of the Trump administration — people are going to be less willing to participate in the survey and documentation that goes into these reports,” Narro said.
Michael Capuano, research director at Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit that advocates for a reduction in immigration, said the numbers are trending in the right direction.
“We see it as a positive start,” Capuano said. “Obviously enforcement at the border is now working. The population is beginning to decrease. We’d like to see that trend continue because, ultimately, we think the policy of the last four years has been proven to be unsustainable.”
Capuano disagrees that the decrease in immigrants will cause problems for the country’s workforce.
“We don’t believe that ultimately there’s going to be this huge disruption,” he said. “There is no field that Americans won’t work in. Pew notes in its own study that American-born workers are the majority in every job field.”
In 2023, the last year with complete data, 33 million immigrants were part of the country’s workforce, including about 10 million undocumented individuals. Roughly 19% of workers were immigrants in 2023, up from 15% two decades earlier, according to Pew.
“Immigrants are a huge part of American society,” said Toby Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at UCLA. “Those who are running the federal government right now imagine that they can remove all immigrants from this society, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen because the children of immigrants will fight against it and because our country needs immigrant workers to make the economy work.”
The United States experienced a negative net immigration in the 1930s during the Great Depression when at least 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans left the country, often as a result of government pressure and repatriation programs. Not long after, the U.S. implemented the bracero program in 1942 in which the U.S. allowed millions of Mexican citizens to work in the country to address labor shortages during World War II.
Higbie predicts the decline in immigration won’t last long, particularly if prices on goods rise amid labor shortages.
“You could say that there’s a cycle here where we invite immigrants to work in our economy, and then there’s a political reaction by some in our country, and they kick them out, and then we invite them back,” he said. “I suspect that the Trump administration, after going through this process of brutally deporting people, will turn around and propose a guest worker program in order to maintain a docile immigrant workforce.”
Aug. 21 (UPI) — Pew Research Center released on Thursday found that “unauthorized immigrants” in the United States hit a record high in 2023 of 14 million entering the country.
That 14 million included about 6 million who were protected from deportation via some other status, including victims of violent crime, Pew said in its report. These protections can be, and in some cases have been, removed by the federal government, sometimes with little notification.
The report only covers up to 2023, which is the latest year data were available.
The label “unauthorized immigrants” includes an array of statuses, including those who entered the United States illegally. The term groups together immigrants living in the country with impermanent, precarious statuses, Pew said.
The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population includes any immigrants who are not in these groups: Lawful permanent residents (green card holders), refugees formally admitted to the United States, people granted asylum, former unauthorized immigrants granted legal residence under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, naturalized U.S. citizens who entered under the prior four categoires as well as temporary legal residents under specific visa categories, such as those for foreign students, guest workers and intracompany transfers.
The report said that the rise in immigration came after the COVID-19 pandemic when U.S. immigration policy changed. Lawful admissions rose, as well as encounters between migrants and U.S. authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border
The 14 million number came after two years of record growth, according to a Pew estimate. The increase of 3.5 million in two years is the largest on record.
The number with temporary protections from deportations increased after 2021, following policy changes made by the President Joe Biden administration that allowed many immigrants to arrive in the U.S. with protected status and others to gain protection soon after arrival.
In 2023, unauthorized immigrants accounted for 27% of all U.S. immigrants, up from 22% in 2021. The group’s share of the U.S. population increased from 3.1% to 4.1%.
The six states with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations in 2023 were California with 2.3 million, Texas at 2.1 million, Florida with 1.6 million, 825,000 in New York, New Jersey with 600,000 and Illinois at 550,000.
These states have consistently had the most unauthorized immigrants since at least 1980. But in 2007, California had 1.2 million more unauthorized immigrants than Texas. Today, it has only about 200,000 more.
These populations grew in 32 states from 2021 to 2023. Florida saw the largest growth with an increase of 700,000, followed by Texas at 450,000, California with 425,000 and New York with an increase of 230,000.
Eight more states saw their unauthorized immigrant populations increase by 75,000 or more: New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio.
