Fuller Portrait of Hispanic Undocumented Migrants

Most Live in Families and an Increasing Number Have High School Educations

 

WASHINGTON (Pew Hispanic Center) June 14, 2005 - Contrary to the stereotype of undocumented migrants as single males with very little education who perform manual labor in agriculture or construction, a new Pew Hispanic Center report shows that most of the undocumented population lives in families, a quarter has at least some college education and that illegal workers can be found in many sectors of the US economy.

 

Building on previous work that estimated the size and geographic dispersal of the undocumented population, the new report offers a portrait of that population in unprecedented detail by examining family composition, educational attainment, income and employment.

 

“Undocumented Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics” was prepared by Jeffrey S. Passel, a veteran demographer and senior research associate at the Center, using a well-established methodology to analyze data from the March 2004 Current Population Survey, which was conducted by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

The report estimates the number of persons living in families in which the head of the household or the spouse is an undocumented migrant—13.9 million as of March 2004, including 4.7 million children. Of those individuals, some 3.2 million are US citizens by birth but are living in “mixed status” families in which some members are undocumented, usually a parent, while others, usually children, are Americans by birthright.

 

“The large number of US citizen children born to parents with no legal status highlights one of the thorniest dilemmas in developing policies to deal with the undocumented population,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research center based in Washington DC.

 

The report also offers extensive data on the employment of undocumented migrants, mapping their presence in many sectors of the US labor force. The report finds that at least 6.3 million undocumented workers were employed as of March 2004, comprising 4.3 percent of the civilian labor force. Since 1986 it has been illegal for employers to hire workers lacking proof of proper immigration status.

 

While 3 percent of undocumented workers are employed in agriculture, 33 percent have jobs in service industries and substantial shares can be found in construction and extractive occupations (16%) and in production, installation and repair (17%).

 

Overall, undocumented migrants are less educated than other sectors of the population with 49 percent having not completed high school, compared with 9 percent of the native-born and 25 percent of legal immigrants. Nonetheless, a quarter of the undocumented have at least some college education and another quarter have finished high school.

 

“Not all of the undocumented population fits the stereotype of a poorly educated manual laborer,” Passel said.

 

The new report was developed as a briefing paper for the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, co-chaired by former Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN). The bipartisan task force has been convened by the Migration Policy Institute in partnership with the Manhattan Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The report on the undocumented population was presented to the task force by the Pew Hispanic Center to provide a factual basis for its discussions; the Pew Hispanic Center, which does not engage in issue advocacy, is not participating in the task force’s deliberations or its policy recommendations.

 

The report builds on a previous report by Passel released in March that estimated the undocumented population at 10.3 million as of March 2004 and examined its dispersal to a variety of new destinations. Given recent growth rates the number of undocumented migrants now approaches 11 million. The first section of the new report reviews those estimates, and the report then goes on to present additional material that examines the current characteristics of the undocumented population for the first time.

 

Some of the report’s major findings include:

 

Undocumented workers make up a large share of the workforce in a number of occupations that require neither government licensing nor education credentials. For example, about a quarter of all drywall and ceiling tile installers in the United States are undocumented migrants, as are about a quarter of all meat and poultry workers and a quarter of all dishwashers.

 

Labor force participation rates are higher among male undocumented migrants (92%) than in other sectors of the population (e.g. 83% of the native-born). In contrast female undocumented migrants are less likely to work, with a labor force participation rate of 56% compared with 73% of the native-born.

 

The education level of undocumented migrants arriving in recent years is higher than the levels of those who have been in the country for a decade or more. The share who lack a high school degree is lower among those who have been in the United States for 10 years or less than among those of longer tenure (45% vs. 56%) and the share with some college education is higher (19% vs. 10%).

 

Since the mid-1990s the number of undocumented migrants arriving in the United States has exceeded the number of new legal immigrants. In recent years some 700,000 undocumented migrants have arrived annually, compared with about 610,000 legal immigrants.

 

Incomes for undocumented migrants are low compared to legal immigrants and the native-born, but they increase somewhat the longer an individual is in the country. The average family income in 2003 for undocumented migrants in the country for less than ten years was $25,700, while those who had been in the country for a decade or more earned $29,900. In contrast, average family incomes were considerably higher for both legal immigrants ($47,800) and the native-born ($47,700).