A growing number of Americans believe that immigrants are a burden to the country, taking jobs and housing and creating strains on the health care system. Many people also worry about the cultural impact of the expanding number of newcomers in the U.S.
The number of migrants coming to the United States each year, legally and illegally, grew very rapidly starting in the mid-1990s, hit a peak at the end of the decade, and then declined substantially after 2001.
The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the South than anywhere else in the United States.
Most of the unauthorized population lives in families, a quarter has at least some college education and illegal workers can be found in many sectors of the US economy.
The undocumented population of the US now numbers nearly 11 million people, including more than 6 million Mexicans according to new estimates based on the most recent official data available.
This brief report presents estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in mid-2001 for three separate groups: the total unauthorized population, the Mexican unauthorized population, and the non-Mexican Central American unauthorized population. The approach to estimation used is one set forth recently by Bean, et al (2001) that extends and amplifies work originally begun as part of the Mexico/U.S. Binational Migration Study (1997; Bean, et al. 1998). The specific features of the approach are described in detail in Bean, et al (2001). Basically, the method involves subtracting estimates of the numbers of persons residing in the country legally from the numbers of foreign born persons in official government surveys (which are known to contain both legal and unauthorized persons), and then adjusting for extra undercount of such persons in the surveys. The resulting figures give estimates of various unauthorized populations in the country.
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