'Unauthorized' Americans

By John Hickey
The recent congressional focus on illegal immigration, and the resulting well-organized (peaceful) mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Latinos across dozens of American cities, have brought attention to the collapse of U.S. immigration policy.

Official U.S. immigration policy is being made irrelevant by a rapid and massive increase in illegal immigration. Widely accepted research of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, indicates that since 2000 there has been a 40 percent increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the United States, while the U.S. population, by Census figures, has increased by only 6 percent. “Growth in the unauthorized population has averaged more than 500,000 per year,” the Pew Center says, estimating that there are now approximately 12 million illegal immigrants (“unauthorized migrants”) in the United States.

Most of these 12 million illegal immigrants, the Center says, come from Mexico (56 percent) and from other Latin American countries (22 percent). Nine million people from Latin America, in other words, are in this country illegally. The total population of the United States is a little less than 300 million. So, according to this respected research foundation, three out of every hundred people in the United States are illegal immigrants from Latin America. (The overall Hispanic population, documented and undocumented, as measured by the Census Bureau, grew by 60 percent in the 1990s and is now estimated to be 14 percent of the total U.S. population.)

From 1992 to 2004, says the Center, “The unauthorized share of immigration inflows increased and the share that was legal decreased. By the end of the period, more unauthorized migrants than authorized immigrants were entering the United States.” By 2005, says the Center, “unauthorized migrants” made up a greater proportion of the U.S.’s foreign-born population than legal permanent residents.

The Pew Center estimates that, between 2000 and 2005, the number of unauthorized migrants in the United States from Mexico and other Central American countries increased by about 2 million. From Mexico alone, the number of unauthorized migrants increased by 1.5 million in those five years. In other words, 400,000 undocumented immigrants per year are entering the United States from Central America, and 300,000 of those are coming from Mexico.

The Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, says that legal immigration is limited to a yearly worldwide cap of 675,000, not including refugees, with a yearly per-country ceiling of 25,620 immigrants per year.


Including refugees, U.S. policy authorizes about a million immigrants per year, and restricts legal immigration from any one nation to fewer than 26,000 people, but, illegally, 300,000 migrants a year are coming into the United States from the nation of Mexico alone.


The 9 million illegal immigrants who are in this country from Latin America have a great economic, cultural, and political impact on the United States, and will have a greater impact in the future.

Their children born in the United States are, by birthright, U.S. citizens, with special rights to sponsor the future legal immigration of spouses and other family members. U.S. citizens who are citizens by virtue of being born in this country to immigrant parents are, as a group, more likely than other citizens to be the sponsors of further immigration from their parents’ country of origin, so the 400,000 yearly undocumented immigrants coming from Central America and the 9 million undocumented Latin American immigrants they join here are likely to have a great effect, through their children, on legal immigration in the future.

Most legal immigrants to the United States are admitted, says the Congressional Research Service, “because of family relationship to a U.S. citizen or [legal] immigrant. Of the almost 800,000 legal immigrants [including refugees, in fiscal year 1997], 67 percent entered on the basis of family ties. Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens made up the single largest group of immigrants. Family preference immigrants - the spouses and children of immigrants, the adult children of U.S. citizens, and the siblings of adult U.S. citizens - were the second largest group.”

If the 12 million unauthorized migrants who are in this country are granted amnesty and citizenship, they will not have to wait for their children to become adults to sponsor new legal immigration. Those 12 million newly authorized citizens will themselves immediately have rights to sponsor immigration from their countries of origin. New legal immigrants from Latin America may be sponsored in numbers which are multiples of 9 million; or perhaps multiples of 10 million or more, if amnesty and citizenship is also eventually granted to the 500,000 unauthorized migrants currently entering the United States each year.