Something on the order of 40 million people are first generation immigrants. Obviously a lot of them are very well educated, but many others come with little f

Something on the order of 40 million people are first generation immigrants. Obviously a lot of them are very well educated, but many others come with little formal education and little english. I know there are some literacy requirements for citizenship, but I don't know how much that and education together would cut into the 40 million. http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/charts/final.fb.shtml http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/charts/final.fb.... I presume that's some non-trivial part of the "functionally illiterate" in the US. The graph even shows the number rising rapidly which may go some way to explain rising levels of illiteracy in the US. (And just in case there's any ambiguity, I don't attach any stigma to immigrants coming here being functionally or entirely illiterate. Half of my own ancestors didn't know English when they got here either)