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Salvadoran immigrants

Salvadoran immigrants represent one of the largest Central American communities in the United States, with approximately 20 percent of Salvadorans residing there by the early twenty-first century. Immigration from El Salvador has roots dating back to the late nineteenth century, initially driven by economic opportunities linked to the coffee industry. However, significant waves of immigration began in the late 1970s, primarily as a response to a civil war that resulted in widespread violence and instability, prompting many to flee persecution and seek better living conditions.

Throughout the subsequent decades, challenges such as natural disasters, economic hardships, and gang violence continued to drive migration, leading to substantial undocumented immigration. Salvadorans have made notable contributions to the U.S. economy, participating in diverse job sectors and sending remittances back to their home country, which play a vital role in its economy. The community has faced legal challenges regarding their immigration status, with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) becoming a key issue amidst changing U.S. immigration policies. As of 2022, around 1.4 million Salvadorans lived in the United States, highlighting their ongoing presence and influence within American society.

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SIGNIFICANCE: One of the smallest Central American nations, El Salvador has supplied a disproportionate number of immigrants to the United States. By the 2020s, the number of Salvadorans living in the United States equaled about 40 percent of El Salvador's total population.

Salvadorans have immigrated to the United States since the late nineteenth century, but substantial Salvadoran immigration did not begin until after a bloody civil war exploded in the tiny Central American nation in 1979. Since then, deteriorating economic conditions, natural disasters, and gang violence have pushed more than one million Salvadorans to seek better lives in the United States. Most have come as undocumented workers.

Pre–Civil War Immigrants

The first wave of Salvadoran migration can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when San Francisco–based companies established business contracts with Salvadoran and other Central American coffee growers. The migration networks established were initially limited to the elite, but later extended to Salvadorans who were recruited to work in California coffee factories and other industries. During the 1930s, a combination of harsh economic conditions and political instability drove many Salvadorans to leave their homeland. The military regime of Maximiliano Hernández forced middle- and upper-class Salvadorans into exile. These immigrants resettled mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City, where they found employment in the cities’ industrial sectors.

Another important immigration wave took place during the 1940s, as World War II created a significant demand for labor. Some Salvadorans went to work in the Panama Canal Zone, and many others got contracts to work in Southern California. By 1960, around 6,085 Salvadoran immigrants lived in the US. After the passage of the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened immigration to many countries that had not been historically included, some 100,000 Central Americans, many of them Salvadorans, immigrated to the United States. By 1970, 19,300 Salvadoran immigrants lived in the US, but this grew exponentially in subsequent years, reaching 94,100 by 1980. They settled not only in California but also in Texas, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.

Post-1979 Immigration

The migration of Salvadorans to the United States between 1979 and the late 1990s was prompted mainly by political instability resulting from the civil war that ravaged the country from 1979 to 1992. During this period, the left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front escalated its armed insurgency against the conservative oligarchy and military government ruling El Salvador. During the conflict, military and right-wing paramilitary death squads targeted labor leaders, intellectuals, religious leaders who were deemed subversive because of their adherence to Liberation Theology, and other sympathizers with the uprising. By the time peace accords were signed in 1992, some 75,000 Salvadorans had died.

Throughout the civil war, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the country. Some left because of persecution and death threats from both the government and leftist guerrillas, while many rural laborers whose livelihood was disrupted by the conflict emigrated in search of economic opportunities. The war’s impact on immigration to the United States was significant. By 1990, the number of Salvadorans residing in the country rose to 465,000. Immigrant settlement patterns followed those of earlier waves of migration, with Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York remaining the top destinations. However, Salvadorans also settled in other cities with substantial Hispanic populations, such as Miami and Boston. In Los Angeles, Salvadorans soon became the second-largest immigrant community.

The immigration of Salvadoran refugees into the United States during the civil war was mired in political controversy. The Salvadorans were not given the same refugee status that refugees from many other nations had enjoyed, so most entered the country illegally and experienced a long, painful journey toward legal residency. During the 1980s, fewer than 3 percent of Salvadoran applicants were granted refugee status. In 1985, religious and refugee-service organizations sued the US government for discrimination against Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers. The US Immigration Act of 1990 created a temporary protected status (TPS) and designated Salvadorans as its first recipients. Salvadorans were later allowed to register for “deferred enforced departure” between 1992 and 1996, but even those provisions left many Salvadorans with uncertain immigration status.

Salvadoran immigration to the United States continued after El Salvador’s civil war. A devastated economy, poverty, and insecurity propelled more Salvadorans to seek jobs or family reunification in the United States. Earthquakes in 2001 left 1.5 million Salvadorans without homes, further disrupting economic recovery and fueling emigration. This time, however, immigrants who reached the United States settled in states that had not traditionally attracted many Hispanic immigrants, seeking agricultural and construction jobs, such as North Carolina and Arkansas. By 2000, the population of people living in the US who claimed Salvadoran heritage reached 710,000, and the population of foreign-born Salvadorans living in the US reached 540,000.

In the 2000s and 2010s, drug cartels and related gang violence pushed even more Salvadorans to leave their homes in search of safety in the United States. By the 2010 census, most Salvadorans living in the US had settled in California, Texas, New York, Virginia, Maryland, or Washington, DC. Data from the US Census Bureau put the total number of ethnic Salvadorans in the United States in 2016 at 2.19 million, of whom an estimated 1.29 million were born outside the US. However, some 871,693 were not US citizens. A Pew Research Center study found that in 2015, just over half of immigrants from the so-called Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were undocumented.

In January 2018, the US government announced the termination of TPS for Salvadorans, meaning they would have to leave the country unless they could obtain a visa or another immigration status. However, federal court rulings delayed this termination until 2019 and eventually rescinded it in 2023. In June 2023, the US Department of Homeland Security extended TPS for El Salvadorans through March 2025. This affected more than 337,000 immigrants at risk of expulsion, many of whom had lived in the US for decades. TPS was later extended again through September 2026 using legislation that authorized an extension for persons affected by war, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary crises. Salvadorans contribute to the US economy by engaging in both high- and low-skilled occupations. Their remittances ($8.5 billion in 2024) are vital to El Salvador, accounting for roughly one quarter of the country's economy. This makes changes surrounding TPS particularly important for Salvadorian Americans and for the people of El Salvador.

By the 2020s, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reported that 2.5 million people of Salvadorian heritage lived in the US. About half of the Salvadoran-origin population was foreign-born, and among them, about half had lived in the US for more than twenty years. Salvadorans made up 4 percent of America's Hispanic population. About 30 percent of the Salvadoran population lived in California, but sizable populations also lived in Texas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia. Among those born abroad, 36 percent of Salvadorans held citizenship in the early 2020s.


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