As we barrel toward Election Day 2024, immigration will certainly remain a top issue here in Arizona and across the country. Republicans have vilified what they call an invasion of illegal immigrants, and accuse them of causing a rise in crime — a claim that has been disproven by the data.
So, let’s take a few minutes to find out more about what we know about undocumented immigrants living in the country. The Pew Research Center is out now with a report on this population — and they found, it’s growing.
The Show spoke more about it with Pew’s director of race and ethnicity research, Mark Hugo Lopez.
Full conversation
MARK HUGO LOPEZ: Yes, this is a population that's not necessarily seeking to be sought after by, say, marketers or survey researchers like myself. And the way we do this is we take data that's available from the Census Bureau.
The Census Bureau does a number of surveys, one of which is the American Community Survey, which is a survey of over 3 million households in the United States. Well, that includes households that have undocumented people in them.
And so what we do is we identify the immigrant population in the United States. We then identify those who are in the country legally and taking that difference, the residual, is what we use to generate an estimate of people who are likely in the country without authorization.
Now, we don't know for sure if they are, but this is an estimate of that population, given what we know about people who are in the country illegally, who have citizenship.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. So give us the big picture findings here. There are 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the country. How does that compare to years past?
LOPEZ: So, that's right. 11 million living in the country as of 2022 — and I want to say in 2022 is important to keep in mind, given everything that's happened since 2022. But the number of undocumented or unauthorized people living in the country had reached a low of about 10.2 million right before the pandemic.
So, in 2019, we had estimated that the population was at about 10.2 million. The 11 million in the country today is actually a number that has been rising in recent years, but is still below the peak of 2007, when we estimate there were 12.2 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country then.
So, we've had a higher number of people living in the country who were undocumented. But we've also seen, recently, a reversal in a declining trend of the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the country now on the increase.
GILGER: That's interesting. And, as you mentioned, that data goes back to 2022. We don't have data newer than that. But do you expect that same trend has probably continued over the last couple of years in which, as you said, a lot has changed on this front?
LOPEZ: More than likely. The number of people who, since 2022, have presented themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum protection, for example, are people who would be entering the country without authorization, and will be a part of this unauthorized immigrant population number.
So, it's likely this number has continued to rise. Maybe by at least one and a half, maybe 2 million people. But it remains to be seen because this is also a population that's oftentimes changing. Changing because people choose to return to their home countries, or also people may be deported, or people may pass away.
GILGER: Do we know how many are in Arizona, as compared to the rest of the country, as a border state?
LOPEZ: Yes, Arizona is an important state in that it's important to talk about Arizona's story when it comes to the size of its unauthorized immigrant population. So, about 250,000 undocumented immigrants, we estimate, live in Arizona. That's about 3.5% of all Arizonans.
GILGER: So, let's talk about what might be behind this trend of increase. You talked about asylum seekers coming, we've heard story after story for so long — until really just the last couple of months — of border towns being packed, of border patrol being met with record numbers of people presenting themselves for asylum. Those people count as unauthorized immigrants?
LOPEZ: Yes, because they enter the country without authorization. They're subject to deportation and they're awaiting the decision on a legal case — that is the case of their asylum. So, because they're in the country without authorization, they are identified as undocumented or unauthorized immigrants.
GILGER: Where are these migrants coming from? You also found big changes here in terms of this assumption that migrants who are arriving at the border are coming from Mexico.
LOPEZ: Yeah, this is actually one of the big stories of trends over the last, I'd say, 20 years. The number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at almost 7 million people. So, almost 7 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico alone. They made up more than half of the undocumented immigrant population at the time.
But today — I'm sorry — as of 2022, I should say, there are 4 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico. So, that's a drop of almost 3 million people since 2007.
What we have seen, though, is a growing number of people from countries like El Salvador, from Guatemala, from Honduras, but also interestingly, people from places like India, places like China, Brazil, places in Africa.
And so, the composition of today's undocumented immigrants is different. It's changing compared to where we used to be. So, while 4 million undocumented immigrants of that 11 million we were talking about earlier are from Mexico, the remainder are from other countries — with some countries like India among the fastest growing.
GILGER: Wow. So not the profile, we assume, right, arriving at the Southern border?
LOPEZ: Yeah, actually, that's an important point. It's not the same profile of people arriving at the Southern border. It also includes people who may have overstayed a visa, or say, were here for a job on an H1-B visa, lost their job but haven't left the United States. And so, they fall into an unauthorized immigrant status because they don't have a visa to stay in the country.
So, all of that is part of the reason why we're seeing some change in the composition of origin countries, because people come to the US for many different reasons.
GILGER: Right, right. How big of a chunk of the population are visa overstayers? It used to be the majority. Is that still true?
LOPEZ: It used to. That's some of the research that the Congress has released. And certainly, it's something it's hard to tell. So, we can't really tell where we are today. But it does seem like those who are overstays are a bigger part of the story than before.
But, the number of people crossing the US-Mexico border seeking asylum protection, or also people who may be in the United States and have been granted temporary protected status, those numbers are up as well. So, there's a number of reasons, a number of sources for these changes. It's not just about overstay.
GILGER: Yeah. There's also an interesting and corresponding finding here that unauthorized workers have gone up by almost a million since 2019. Is this just corresponding with the rise in unauthorized immigrants? Like these people will work, they just, you know, they'll work "under the table."
LOPEZ: It's a little bit of that. And it's also that the US over this period — at least since the end of the pandemic — has really seen strong job market growth, and many employers still are looking to fill jobs that haven't been filled. So, part of this is the attractiveness of the US job market and people coming to the US to work in the job market.
GILGER: Yeah. So, at the same time, I want to put this into broader perspective, because this is still just a small chunk of the overall immigrant population, the legal immigrant population in the country, right?
LOPEZ: That's right. I think this is actually one of the key takeaways from our report is that when we talk about the more than 46 million people who are in the United States today, who are immigrants — people born outside the United States. Half of that group are US citizens, they've naturalized and become US citizens. And another quarter are people who are in the country legally, they're lawful permanent residents. They have the equivalent of, what we would call, a green card to be in the country and may even be on their way to becoming a US citizen.
So, most immigrants in the United States today are in the country lawfully — more than three quarters, in fact, about 77%. That number has been going up because the number of immigrants who enter the country legally over the last 10 years or so has been growing faster than the declining number of unauthorized immigrants until just recently.
But still, the unauthorized immigrant population only makes up about a quarter of all immigrants in the United States today.
GILGER: Yeah. All right. We will leave it there for now. Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, joining us. Mark, thanks for coming on. Thanks for breaking all these numbers down. Appreciate it.
LOPEZ: Thank you.
