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Jeffrey S. Passel

Senior Demographer

Expertise:Global Migration and Demography, Hispanic Trends

Jeffrey Passel is a senior demographer at Pew Research Center.

His work focuses on immigration to the United States, the demography of racial and ethnic groups, and the demographic structure of the U.S. population. He developed estimates of the size of the unauthorized immigrant population and methods to describe their characteristics and impacts that are widely cited.

Jeff has also worked on how racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. are defined, how people identify themselves and how these measures have changed over time. He mainly uses U.S. government data to help people understand ongoing changes in the composition of the U.S. population, its history and its future.

Jeff has been on several National Academy of Sciences panels, focusing mainly on immigration, its measurement and impact. He was an adviser to the U.S. Census Bureau and has chaired and served on various committees for the Population Association of America.

Before joining the Center, Jeff served as principal research associate at the Urban Institute’s Labor, Human Services and Population Center. Before that, he worked in various roles at the Census Bureau, including measuring census undercount and directing their program for population estimates and projections.

Jeff has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and degrees from the University of Texas in Austin and MIT.

Publications

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  • report

    U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050

    If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants.

  • report

    Growing Share of Immigrants Choosing Naturalization

    The proportion of all legal foreign-born residents who have become naturalized U.S. citizens rose to 52% in 2005, the highest level in a quarter of a century and a 15 percentage point increase since 1990.

  • report

    The Rise Of The Second Generation

    As it continues to grow, the composition of the Hispanic population is undergoing a fundamental change: Births in the United States are outpacing immigration as the key source of growth. Over the next twenty years this will produce an important shift in the makeup of the Hispanic population with second-generation Latinos–the U.S.-born children of immigrants– emerging as the largest component of that population. Given the very substantial differences in earnings, education, fluency in English, and attitudes between foreign-born and native-born Latinos, this shift has profound implications for many realms of public policy, and indeed for anyone seeking to understand the nature of demographic change in the United States.