The unauthorized immigrant population in the United States reached 10.5 million in 2021. That was a modest increase over 2019 but nearly identical to 2017.
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.
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.
In light of President George W. Bush's January 7, 2004 announcement of a new immigration initiative, the Pew Hispanic Center provided information about attitudes towards immigrant and immigration policy, and estimates of the size of the undocumented population in the United States. Sources for the data are the National Survey of Latinos, conducted in 2002 jointly by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center's March 2002 report entitled “How Many Undocumented: The Numbers Behind the U.S.-Mexico Migration Talk.”
This paper addresses three questions: (1) How many unauthorized workers are employed in U.S. agriculture? (2) How many unauthorized farm workers would be eligible for a legalization or guest worker program that required e.g. 60, 90 or 120 days of U.S. farm work during a qualifying 12-month base period? (3)How many guest workers would be admitted under the most likely legalization/guest worker programs; that is, what are likely exit rates from the farm work force for newly legalized workers? The concluding section discusses the implications of alternative scenarios for dealing with immigration and farm workers.
There are more than 5 million unauthorized workers in the U.S. economy. This study estimates that these workers have become a very substantial presence in the sectors where they are concentrated. More than a million undocumented persons are employed in manufacturing and a similar number in the service industries. More than 600,000 work in construction and more than 700,000 in restaurants.
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.