Jeffrey S. Passel

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.