This study has some useful information about the size of the unauthorized population and the geographic origins. For the first time I see a figure indicating a rapid increase in the number of unauthorized Indians.
The study does not address the number of unauthorized workers. My guess is that a very high percentage of all of these immigrants are working, especially recent arrivals who probably do not come with families. For instance, the 2005 total figures for Mexicao and El Salvador are equal to 5.6% and 7.0% of their respective populations at home. I suspect that the American-based numbers represent more like 7.5% and 10% of the home workforces.
The study estimates the January 2006 figure at “nearly 11 million”, having risen by and “annual average” of 408,000 in the 2000-2004 period. The figure for January 2005 is 10.5 million.
Those within the 10.5 figure came to the U.S. in these time frames:
1980-1984 10%
1985-1989 11%
1990-1994 20%
1995-1999 30%
2000-2002 20%
2003-2004 9%
It estimates that 1/1/05 there were 27,320,000 foreign born ….10,500,000 of these being unauthorized.
Origins (figures in 000s)
Country 2005, 2000
Mexico 5970 4680
El Salvador 470 430
Guatamala 370 290
India 280 120
China 230 190
Korea 210 180
Philippines 210 200
Honduras 180 160
Brazil 170 100
Vietnam 160 160
other 2250 1950

The New Times reports on the findings of the 2005 American Community Survey. The Survey results confirm what has been discerned already: more immigrants, chief among them Mexicans, and more spread out across the country.

Two decades ago, demographers said, some 75 percent to 80 percent of new immigrants settled in one of the half-dozen gateway states and tended to stay there. Then, in the last 10 to 15 years, the pattern shifted and increasing numbers began to stay in the gateways briefly and then move. Now, they say, the pattern is that more immigrants are simply bypassing the gateways altogether.

The Times reports that the survey is intended as an annual bolster to the bureau’s constitutionally mandated census of the country’s population every 10 years. It began as a test program in 1996 and has gradually expanded to where it can now provide detailed data for nearly 7,000 geographic areas, including all Congressional districts and counties or cities of 65,000 or more.
It goes on:
“What’s happening now is that immigrants are showing up in many more communities all across the country than they have ever been in,” said Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So it’s easy for people to look around and not just see them, but feel the impact they’re having in their communities. And a lot of these are communities that are not accustomed to seeing immigrants in their schools, at the workplace, in their hospitals.”
By far the largest numbers of immigrants continue to live in the six states that have traditionally attracted them: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. Immigrants also continue to flow into a handful of states in the Southeast, like Georgia and North Carolina, a trend that was discerned in the 2000 census. But it is in the less-expected immigrant destinations that demographers find the most of interest in the new data. Indiana saw a 34 percent increase in the number of immigrants; South Dakota saw a 44 percent rise; Delaware 32 percent; Missouri 31 percent; Colorado 28 percent; and New Hampshire 26 percent.
“Essentially, it’s a continuation of the Mexicanization of U.S. immigration,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. “You would expect Mexicans to be increasing their share in places like Georgia and North Carolina, which already saw some increases, but they’ve also increased their share of the population, and quite dramatically, in states like Michigan, Delaware and Montana.”
More of America’s immigrants, legal or not, come from Mexico than any other country, an estimated 11 million in 2005, compared with nearly 1.8 million Chinese and 1.4 million Indians.

This Bremerton, WA Kitsap Sun article is about as insightful an analysis of inter-country financial flows from low wage immigrant workers as I have seen. A southern Mexico town of 30,000 is receiving about $2,000 per resident per year in remittances!
By Kevin Diaz, July 12, 2006

A pickup truck with Minnesota plates bounced down the dirt road on the edge of town, raising clouds of reddish dust. It caught the eye of a grazing Brahman bull and disappeared behind a clutch of mango trees bordering a new subdivision, where tangles of steel reinforcing bars sprouted from the roofs of unfinished concrete block houses.

Many of the new houses were paid for with money sent by a secret workforce in Minnesota. By Mayor Leopoldo Rodriguez’s estimate, almost a third of the town’s workers have crossed the border – many of them illegally – and headed north to work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area over the past 10 years.

The money they wire back arrives daily by police escort in armored trucks. Altogether, it comes to between $4 million and $7 million a month, according to money-transfer agencies in the Twin Cities region. The cash has forged an economic link between Axochiapan and Minneapolis-St. Paul that is part of a global trend. It is changing Axochiapan, one household at a time.

Padre Miguel Franco Galicia, parish priest at the Church of San Pablo in Axochiapan…has visited Minneapolis several times to minister to his expatriate parishioners. He estimates that at least 60 percent of Axochiapan’s population receives money from family members working in the United States, most of them in Minnesota. ‘To be honest, I think there are more pluses than minuses, from an economic point of view,’ he said. ‘But the social devastation is enormous.’

Axochiapan (pronounced Ah-sho-chee-AH-pahn), a town of about 30,000 in southern Mexico, has known little but poverty for centuries. People made a living by farming, or by working in the gypsum mines outside of town. The recent flow of Minnesota money has improved life. Pizza deliveries, aerobics studios and Internet cafes, alongside tortilla shops and taquerias, now serve an increasingly cosmopolitan population.

More below….

Continue reading “Building boom in Mexican town was born in Minnesota”

A Pew Hispanic Center study of the Hispanic vote in the 2004 elections analyzes the where eligible voters reside. (The study discusses in depth the low actual voting rate of Hispanics, as well.)
The Hispanic population remains concentrated in a few states. Several of those states were decided by wide margins in the last presidential election and do not appear to be battlegrounds in the current campaign. Texas, California and New York are all generally considered uncontested states in the presidential race, and 58% of all Latino eligible voters live in those three states alone.
Among the 18 states generally considered battlegrounds in the presidential election because they were decided by a margin of less than 7% of the popular vote in 2000, Latinos comprise at least 10% of the eligible voters in Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona. The Hispanic electorate has distinctly different characteristics in each of those states and different patterns of growth since 2000.
Florida: Hispanics make up 14% of the eligible voters, and they are unusual
because so many are naturalized citizens (44% of Latino eligible voters in Florida
compared to 24% nationally). Nonetheless, the fastest growth has been among
native born Latinos who account for 83% of the new eligible Latino voters in
Florida.
New Mexico: Latinos are 40% of the eligible voters, a greater share by far than in
any other state. These voters are overwhelmingly native-born citizens, 93%.
Nevada: Latinos account for 13% of the eligible voters but their numbers are
growing very fast. Since the last presidential election, the number of eligible
Latinos in Nevada has increased by about 50%, and Latinos account for about half
of all the increase in the Nevada electorate. About two-thirds of the Latino
eligible voters in Nevada are native born.
Arizona: Some 16% of eligible voters in Arizona are Hispanics, and 80% are
native-born citizens.

Hispanic voters – 9% of the total electorate – may be “the fastest growing and perhaps the most volatile swing electorate in American politics.” What has the past year or two done to their political loyalties, after over a decade of movement towards the Republican party? The answer, from this NDN poll discussed further below:
In 2004 Kerry beat Bush 59%-40% with all Hispanics. When asked how they would vote if the Presidential election were held today, this group gives Democrats a remarkable 36-point advantage: 59%-23%. Thus the Republicans lost serious ground but Democrats did not gain any.
Bush’s standing with this group has plummeted. In the 2004 cycle, Bush regularly received a 60% favorable rating from Hispanics. In our survey this was reversed, as 38% see him favorably, 58% unfavorably, with 40% very unfavorable towards the President.
NDN, a Democratic Party-affiliated public interest group, released the results of this survey of Hispanic voters this week, in collaboration with its Hispanic Strategy Center. Another article on a recent Pew Hispanic Center political poll is found
here in the Washington Post.
The NDN survey found that support for Bush and Republicans has “dramatically declined” but that support for Democats has not proportionately increased. “Additionally, the poll offers clear evidence that the immigration debate has increased this community’s participation in the civic life of their nation. More than half of those questioned say the issue will make it more likely that they will vote this year. A remarkable 25% of those surveyed state that they have taken part in recent public demonstrations for better immigration policies. It appears that millions of Hispanics are rising to the “today we march, tomorrow we vote” challenge offered by the leaders of community this year.
The poll, conducted by the New York-based market research firm LatinInsights, surveyed a 600-person national sample of Spanish-dominant Hispanic registered voters. It is the largest poll of Spanish-language dominant Hispanic voters we’ve come across. The poll was paid for by the NDN Political Fund.

Continue reading Poll: hispanic voters turning away from Bush, Repubican party

Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies prepared in 2002 a study of the impact on new immigration to the civilian labor force, by region, between 1990 and 2001. These figures instantly convey the dependence of the economy on immigrant labor. It is reasonable to infer that over a third of the new immigrants were working illegally. Since 2001, the share of immigrant worker growth has probably shifted more to the illegal category, to 1 out of 2 instead of 1 out of 3.
Below are listed regions and the percentage of civilian labor force growth attributed to immigration. A figure of over 100% indicates that without immigrants, the labor force would have declined.
New England 567%
Mid-Atlantic 369%
Eastern North Central 35%
Western North Central 20%
South Atlantic 45%
Eastern South Central 14%
Western South Central 37%
Rocky Mountains 37%
Pacific 21%
These figures appear to understate the impact of immigrant labor on the labor force, because the impact rose after the early 1990s. According to one analysis, the President’s 2005 Economic Report estimated that “The President’s report points out that “between 1996 and 2003, when total employment grew by 11 million, 58 percent of the net increase was among foreign-born workers,” almost all of whom had arrived since 1995. The immigrant share of employment growth was even higher in particular occupations, amounting in the 1996-2002 period to 86 percent of the 1 million new positions in “precision production, craft, and repair” (which includes mechanics and construction workers) and 62 percent of the 2 million new positions in service occupations (such as janitors, kitchen workers, and grounds workers).
“Moreover, this pattern holds true beyond the traditional immigrant-receiving states of California, New York, Texas, and Florida. The President’s report notes that between 1996 and 2003 immigrants accounted for 84 percent of labor-force growth in eastern North Central states (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin) and 47 percent in eastern South Central states (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee).”
The press release from Northeastern is as follows:

Continue reading High impact of immigrant workers on civilian labor force, 1990 – 2001 and beyond

The Asian American Legal Defence and Education Fund, located in New York City, just issued an important study of the 200,000 Korean Americans working in the New York City area.
The study drew upon a sample of 187 low wage Korean immigrant workers, in jobs such as hair and nail salons, dry cleaning, garment making, grocery stores, and health spas. The workers were interviewed between January 2005 and January 2006.
37% had less than a high school education
28% were undocumented workers; 42% were American citizens; 30% legal permanent residents.
Only 6% had more than limited English proficiency
47% worked more than 60 hours a week, yet….
73% had no overtime pay provisions.
15% had either poor health experiences or had been injured on the job.
64% did not know about workers compensation
55% did not know about unemployment compensation

The Washington Post carries a story today about widely varying estimates of the size of foreign born populations in the United States. Getting a realistic count can depend on natural disasters that induce many hiding in the shadows to come forward. It appears not hard for people to come up with estimates double that of the Current Population Survey (CPS), but with no heard research documentation.
It start with an example of a woman who has been an exclusively American citizen for nine years but still calls herself Guatemalan. The U.S. Census counts as Guatamalans those who were born there. Embassies here count also children born here because they may claim citizenship their parents’ country of origin.

The 2000 Census says that 105,000 Salvadoreans live in the Washington, DC area. The Current Population Survey, conducted monthly by the Census Bureau, says the number averaged about 130,000 over the past three years. The Salvadorean embassy says 500,000. In addition to passports issued, the ambassador of Salvador bases his calculations on the number of Salvadorans who registered with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for temporary permission to live in the United States after earthquakes rocked El Salvador in 2001. Nationwide, the number of registrants is 244,000. But, León surmises that only half of the people eligible for the temporary residence program after the disaster signed up for it.

Then the ambassador points to a study showing that $1.2 billion flowed into Latin America from immigrants living in the District, Maryland and Virginia in 2004. Most of that went to El Salvador, León said, noting that Salvadorans living in Virginia send home more money annually than those in any state except California. The number of Salvadorans in the Washington region must be far higher then census-based estimates to have sent such a large sum in just one year, the ambassador said.

Embassy officials say the census vastly undercounts immigrant populations, which have skyrocketed since 2000, when the most accurate and detailed figures were released. The Peruvian general consul estimates 70,000 vs. 23,000 in the CPS. Embassy officials say that no matter the number, their communities’ populations have shot up exponentially in recent years. Talavera, for example, said the Peruvian Embassy issues 40 percent more national identity cards than it did in 2001.

Experts reject claims that immigrant population figures could be several times higher than the census numbers or than the data derived from the less comprehensive Current Population Survey, which polls 50,000 U.S. households each month. Enrique Escorza, the Mexican general consul in Washington, oversees a region that includes the District and all of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. He puts the Mexican community in that region at 250,000, more than twice the 2000 Census count for the same area.

There have been two major waves of Hispanic labor – each leaving their mark – since the 1980s, when the 1986 immigration bill was passed with the intention of controlling migration from Latin America. These waves account for the large majority of undocumented workers. The present immigration uproar from an historical perspective is understandable once one sees how these two waves differ.
Prior to the 1980s, Hispanic immigrant labor was concentrated in agriculture. But farming stopped being a major attraction because, first, job growth died up; second, wages were better elsewhere.
The first of these two waves was what researcher Steve Striffler calls the rise of the industrial chicken, within a meat processing boom. (Striffler wrote Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. I have commented on this excellent source before.) According to another researcher, Russell Cobb, In 1990, the U.S. exported 500,000 metric tons of chicken overseas, while in the year 2000 that figure increased five-fold to 2,500,000, as China and Russia became the two largest consumers of U.S. chicken. Latin America provided the enabling labor.
Rurally based, vertically integrated meat processing spawned into a de facto guest worker program. In 1990, 15% of meat processing labor was Hispanic. In 1998 it was 33%. In 2003 it was 43%. This was the first phase of the growth of a post-farmworker illegal workforce in the country.
Meat processing (poultry in the south, beef and pork in the Midwest) expands in other rural locations such as Duplin County, NC (turkeys) Garden City, KS (beef) and Guymon, OK (pork). From North Carolina to Arkansas, as black and white workers move up the economic ladder, Hispanics fill the labor gap. Meat processing took over from agriculture the role of the leading employment sector for illegal immigrants. In these isolated communities, Hispanic populations rose 1000% or more between the 1990 and 2000 censuses.
Reached by phone at his office at the University of Arkansas, where he is on the anthropology faculty, Striffler described how this demand for labor altered illegal immigration. During the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, new tendrils for new labor supply strung together particular communities in Latin America, labor recruiters working often at the Mexican-American border, and particular rural centers of work in the United States. Other industries benefited, for example the carpet manufacturers of Dalton, GA, which experienced a phenomenal rise in Hispanic population in the 1990s.
The second phase of the post farmworker illegal workforce began. Home construction took over from meat processing the role of leading employer in influencing expectations. Hispanic workers flowed into the residential housing boom, moving closer to these jobs in metropolitan areas throughout the United States. Hispanic employment in construction stood at 650,000 in 1990; 783,000 in 1995,; and 1,408 in 2000. The Pew Hispanic Center, which closely monitors immigration patterns, estimates more illegal Hispanics work today in construction roofing than in the meat processing industry.
This second wave of immigration brought Hispanic workers in large numbers into metropolitan areas – standing in Home Depot parking lots, for example, making themselves much more visible to the public. While the public had little problem with Hispanics producing cheap meat and rugs from isolated rural factories, they have found their presence in cities and suburbs obnoxious – and this has fueled the anti-immigration movement.