MPI Issues New Profiles of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population at U.S., State and Top County Levels, with Wealth of Sociodemographic Detail
WASHINGTON – The Migration Policy Institute today released a fact sheet and two data tools that provide rich detail on unauthorized immigrants in the United States, with statistics on everything from population size and origins to educational enrollment and attainment, employment, income, health care coverage, home ownership and much more.
The fact sheet, Settling In: A Profile of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population in the United States, draws upon MPI’s unique dataset to provide an overview of the characteristics of the estimated 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants at U.S., state and top county levels.
The fact sheet examines these immigrants’ origins, U.S. destinations, length of U.S. residence, educational attainment, English proficiency, employment, income and home ownership. And it includes a section on the 5.1 million children, most U.S. born, who have an unauthorized immigrant parent.
Alongside the fact sheet, MPI has updated its unauthorized immigrant data tool, which offers detailed sociodemographic profiles for the United States, 41 states, the District of Columbia and 135 counties with the largest unauthorized populations.
“We are very pleased to issue these updated profiles on unauthorized immigrants in the United States, hoping they will be of significant value to researchers, policymakers, government agencies and nonprofits that provide public services, journalists and the public,” said MPI Senior Fellow Doris Meissner, who heads the institute’s U.S. immigration policy program. “We have invested countless hours in developing the methodology that allows us to provide these sociodemographic profiles, which offer a unique and important level of detail about this population.”
Because the U.S. Census Bureau does not ask respondents on the decennial census or surveys if they are in the country without authorization, MPI in concert with demographers at Pennsylvania State and Temple universities has developed a unique methodology to assign legal status to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This methodology permits MPI to issue an unprecedentedly detailed level of information about unauthorized immigrants.
Read the fact sheet here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/profile-unauthorized-immigrant-population-united-states.
Access the unauthorized data profiles here: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/us-immigration-policy-program-data-hub/unauthorized-immigrant-population-profiles.
And an interactive map displaying the population size and key U.S. destinations for unauthorized immigrants by region and top countries of origin: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/unauthorized-immigrant-populations-country-and-region-top-state-and-county.
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The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington, DC dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at local, national and international levels.