nearly 30 percent of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2018, hailed from immigrant families, up from 20 percent in 2000.
….
These students, most of them nonwhite, are the offspring of Indians who came to study in the United States and stayed; the children of Latin Americans who crossed the border for blue-collar jobs; and some whose families fled civil wars around the world as refugees.
Children From Immigrant Families Are Increasingly the Face of Higher Education – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Even in 2000-2001, immigrants or children of immigrants accounted for 1 in 3 U.S. college students.
In California, in 2018, immigrants or children of immigrants accounted for about half of all college students.
An additional 5.5 percent of students in 2018 were international students studying in the U.S. and are not counted in the above figures.
But like many children of immigrants, he works almost full time, while studying, to pay for his phone, gas, car insurance and other personal expenses.
I am not an immigrant, nor a child of immigrants nor do I have recent family history of immigrants, yet I also worked from age 10 onward, worked during college, paid all my own tuition and fees, bought my own used car, paid my own insurance and other personal expenses. Thus, that need is not unique to immigrants.
Unlike U.S. citizens, most immigrants are multi-lingual, and many have right of descent residency or dual citizenship options by virtue of being born abroad or having their parents born abroad.