Who Are The International Adopted Children?

Submitted by AngelaW on Tue, 04/15/2008 - 22:54
As I mentioned in this blog and this blog, details on internationally adopted children have been released by the Office of Immigration Statistics for 2007. The US government now has 12 years of immigration data (country of origin, gender and age) for internationally adopted children on-line. I started analyzing Ukrainian adoption trends, but I found myself thinking that I missed a global pattern in international adoption.
 
So I have been taking another look at 12 years worth of data. Here are some tidbits.
 
Americans between 1987 and 2001 adopted 118,000 to 127,000 children per year. These numbers include foster care adoption, domestic agency adoption, independent domestic adoption, tribal adoption, international adoption, kinship adoption and stepparent adoption. Starting in 2001, 15% of these adoptions were international adoptions.
 
220,240 children were internationally adopted by Americans from 1996 to 2007. 72% of the adopted children come from the China, Guatemala, Korea, Russia (CGKR).
 
To take a closer look at these statistics, let's pretend only 10 children were internationally adopted over 12 years. I am going to try and put a face to these kiddos.
 
This means three girls were adopted from China. One child is under 1 year of age. The other two are 1-4 years of age. Aren't they beautiful?
Sailor Child
China-Xian-Oct. 1 baby #3
On The Bridge

One darling girl was adopted from Guatemala. She is under 1 year of age. (Yes, I know the picture shows a child over 1 year of age. But this is a great picture of a Guatemalan child.)

Girl in Tzucubal Guatemala
One good-looking boy, under 1 year old, was adopted from Korea.
 
Tony
A boy and girl were adopted from Russia. The girl is 1-4 years old. The boy is 5 years or older.
 
2 adopted from Russia

 

To recap, ten children are representing all the children internationally adopted by Americans from 1996 to 2007. 
 
Five girls and two boys were adopted from CGKR. Three children were under 1 year of age. Three children were 1-4 years of age. And one child was 5 years or older.
 
We still have 3 more international adopted children to discuss.
 
One girl who is 5 years or older was adopted from India, Kazakhstan, Romania, Ukraine, and Vietnam.  I am using this beautiful  picture from Ladakh district of India to represent this child.
Ladakh India Street Child

The last 2 children are impossible to visualize. I can tell you they are both boys. One child is under 1 year of age. The other boy is 1-4 years of age. They are from 147 different countries. Depending on how you count countries, there are 195 countries in the world. So Americans have adopted from almost every country in the world in a 12 year period.

 
Some of these countries may surprise you. Americans adopted children from Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Belize, Ireland, United Kingdom, Australia, Venezuela, Jordan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, etc..
 
 

Related Links

 

Note: I know the pictures don't exactly match the text in gender or age.  I selected images based on their composition and their licensing. All of these photos are licensed under Creative Commons.

Photo Credits:

 

LisaS's picture

It is so important to put

Submitted by LisaS on Tue, 04/15/2008 - 23:56.

It is so important to put faces to the numbers, and what beautiful faces they are.

 

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury