Key facts about the changing U.S. unauthorized immigrant population
The unauthorized immigrant population’s size and composition has ebbed and flowed significantly over the past 30 years.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The unauthorized immigrant population’s size and composition has ebbed and flowed significantly over the past 30 years.
If unauthorized U.S. immigrants aren’t counted, 3 states could each lose a seat they otherwise would have had and 3 others each could gain one.
Roughly 317,000 immigrants from 10 countries have this status after fleeing dangerous conditions at home. Learn about where these protections stand.
There were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017. The number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants declined since 2007.
The number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants has fallen since its peak of 6.9 million in 2007 and was lower in 2017 than in any year since 2001.
In 2016, a third of unauthorized immigrant adults were proficient in English – up from a quarter in 2007.
In 2016, the 20 U.S. metro areas with the most unauthorized immigrants were home to 6.5 million of them, or 61% of the estimated total.
Unauthorized immigrants make up a quarter of all U.S. foreign-born residents. Our new interactive offers data on unauthorized immigrants by state.
About 250,000 babies were born to unauthorized immigrant parents in the United States in 2016, the latest year for which information is available, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data about illegal immigration. This represents a 36% decrease from a peak of about 390,000 in 2007.
The U.S. Census Bureau is planning to ask everyone living in the United States whether they are citizens when it conducts its next decennial census in 2020.
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