In 2019, California had the highest population of unauthorized immigrants, at around 2.74 million. The overall figure for the United States was estimated to be around 11.05 million unauthorized immigrants.

This statistic shows the top ten metropolitan areas in the United States with highest unauthorized immigrant populations in 2014. With over one million unauthorized people, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA had the highest illegal immigrant population in the United States in 2014.

In January 2022, it was estimated that about 1.85 million male illegal immigrants living in the United States were aged between 35 and 44 years old. In that same year, it was estimated that 1.52 million female illegal immigrants living in the U.S. were between 35 and 44 years old.

In 2022, an estimated 10.99 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States. This is an increase from about 3.5 million unauthorized immigrants who lived in the United States in 1990.

As of January 2022, it was estimated that about 4.81 million illegal immigrants from Mexico were living in the United States. It was also estimated that 750,000 illegal immigrants from Guatemala were living in the United States.

Users can download reports regarding immigrant issues and view maps of the distribution of the foreign-born population in the U.S. Topics include: immigration policy, migration, English language proficiency, and adult education. Background The Migration Policy Institute is a think tank dedicated to studying human migration across the globe. This website is useful for policymakers and practitioners interested in understanding and responding to immigrant integration. Topics include, but are not limited to: migration, immigration policy, English language proficiency, immigration enforcement, and English language education. User Functionality Users can download reports regarding immigrant int egration issues and immigration trends. Users can also access the State Responses to Immigration Database, the American Community Survey of the Foreign Born, and Who's Where in the United States Database. Users can download data into SAS statistical software. In addition, users can view maps showing the distribution of the foreign-born population in the U.S. Demographic information is available by race/ethnicity, Hispanic origin, place of origin, citizenship status, sex/gender, and marital status. Data Notes Data sources include the New Immigrants Survey, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Immigration Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, United States Census Bureau, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, Congressional Research Service, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, National Immigration Law Ce nter, among others. Full citations and years to which the data apply, are indicated in each report. Data are available on national, state and city levels, depending upon the report.

The estimated population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. stands at around 11 million people. Although the number has stabilized, the United States has seen a spike in migrant encounters in the last few years, with over two million cases registered by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2023. This is a slight decrease from the previous year, when there were over 2.2 million cases registered. Due to its proximity and shared border, Mexico remains the leading country of origin for most undocumented immigrants in the U.S., with California and Texas being home to the majority.

Immigration and political division

Despite the majority of the population having immigrant roots, the topic of immigration in the U.S. remains one of the country’s longest-standing political debates. Support among Republicans for restrictive immigration has grown alongside Democratic support for open immigration. This growing divide has deepened the polarization between the two major political parties, stifling constructive dialogue and impeding meaningful reform efforts and as a result, has led to dissatisfaction from all sides. In addition to general immigration policy, feelings toward illegal immigration in the U.S. also vary widely. For some, it's seen as a significant threat to national security, cultural identity, and economic stability. This perspective often aligns with support for stringent measures like Trump's proposed border wall and increased enforcement efforts. On the other hand, there are those who are more sympathetic toward undocumented immigrants, as demonstrated by support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Adults who lean towards the Democratic Party are less likely to believe that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than U.S. citizens, with a 2018 survey finding that 86 percent of Democrats who correctly believe that most immigrants live in the U.S. legally also believe that undocumented immigrants are no more likely than U.S. citizens to commit serious crimes. This drops to 38 percent for Republicans who believe the majority of immigrants are undocumented.

It was estimated that, in 2015, around 75 percent of immigrants in the United States were living in the country legally.

This statistic shows the estimated GDP loss if all illegal immigrant workers were removed from the United States. As of September 2016, the manufacturing industry would suffer an estimated 74 billion U.S. dollar decline in GDP output if all illegal immigrant workers were removed from the U.S.

Acknowledgement

The following table is imported from the 2019 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics under the Department of Homeland Security:

The 2019 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provide data on foreign nationals who are granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., immigrants who receive a “green card”), admitted as temporary nonimmigrants, granted asylum or refugee status, or are naturalized. The Yearbook also presents data on immigration enforcement actions, including apprehensions and arrests, removals, and returns.

Table 39. Aliens Removed or Returned: Fiscal Years 1892 to 2019 (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table39)

Inspiration

The data was collected to observe trends in history reflecting the number of immigrants deported - more specifically removed or returned.

This statistic shows the estimated percentage of employed undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2016, distinguished by industry. In 2017, around 14.2 percent of agriculture workers were estimated to be undocumented immigrants.

Although teen pregnancy has been on the decline in the United States, it remains among the highest within developed countries. Hispanics, who are more likely to be undocumented immigrants, lead this trend, yet the role of legal status has yet to be considered. To investigate this question, we examine teenage fertility responses to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary legal status to undocumented youth. We find that DACA reduced the likelihood of having a teenage birth by 1.6 percentage points and eliminated roughly half of the gap in teenage childbearing between documented and undocumented women.

According to a survey conducted early in 2025, the vast majority of Americans agreed that all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who have been convicted of a violent crime should be deported. Only six percent opposed. However, only 37 percent of respondents were in favor of deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally who have not been convicted of a crime.

Using data from the UC-Berkeley California Survey (a/k/a the Field Poll), we will test a series of hypotheses about the relationship, which we expect to be positive, between real and perceived COVID19 threat and attitudes towards immigration, immigrants, and ethnoracial minorities. Sociological theory, prior research, and historical experience all suggest that immigrants are vulnerable during periods of infectious-disease threat. Drawing on her African fieldwork but generalizing to societies of all kinds, Douglas (1984) note the universal fear of pollution and the universality of rituals employed to protect the social body from contamination. Douglas argues that ritual contamination results from persons and things that are “out of place,” that enter domains in which are liminal, lacking a clear status. Work in this line has noted a homology in modern societies between rhetorical treatments, on the one hand, of immigrants, as outsiders inhabiting a liminal status, and, on the other, of infectious disease, both of which have been depicted dangerous forms of, respectively, social and corporeal penetration (Santa Ana 1999; Cisneros 2008). One may infer from this that concern about infectious disease may stimulate anti-immigrant attitudes among susceptible publics. And, indeed, the historical record contains many examples of immigrant scapegoating in the U.S. during public health emergencies like the typhus and cholera epidemics of the early 1890s (Markel 1999), the bubonic plague outbreaks of 1900-1908 (Chase 2004), and the 1917-18 flu pandemic (Kraut 2010). Since January, reports of hate crimes against Asians blamed for the rise of COVID19 have proliferated (Chapman 2020). Compared to work by historians, anthropologists, and discourse analysts, empirical social-scientific research has been relatively scarce. A recent study (Aaroe, Petersen and Arceneaux 2017) suggests that this elision of immigrant and infectious disease may have a biological foundation. Dutta and Rao (2014) propose that “anxieties about infectious disease not only prime concerns about foreigners as disease threats but also prime the concerns about cultural outgroups as sources of cultural contamination.” They conducted a survey experiment that demonstrated a decline in support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants when respondents were primed with a fictionalized description of a contagious disease originating in a foreign country; and paired this with an historical study demonstrating that resistance to British colonialists was greater in parts of India that had experienced more severe exposure to a cholera epidemic several months earlier.
The emergence of COVID19 as a contemporary pandemic offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between disease threat and attitudes toward immigrants in real time. This study takes advantage of a survey of ~9000 California registered voters, carried out by the UC-Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies in April 2020, which included a large battery of questions about COVID19 and a number of items tapping attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. We will use data from this study to test several hypotheses about the relationship between (a) perceived vulnerability to COVID19 infection, (b) priming with questions about COVID19, and (c) local prevalence of COVID19 to (a) attitudes toward immigrants and (b) attitudes toward immigration. The results of this study will help to determine the validity of an influential body of theory on group boundaries and intergroup relations. If the hypotheses receive some support, the pattern of results (including variation in effects on attitudes toward different minority groups) will provide insight into the extent to which effects are specific to scapegoated groups or instead generalize to all groups perceived as outsiders to the ethnoracial mainstream. With respect to public policy, in so far as the hypotheses are confirmed, the results will alert civic leaders, law enforcement, educators, and others to challenges that may result from increased intergroup conflict and scapegoating of immigrant Americans during and in the wake of the current pandemic.

Abstract (en): Transatlantic Trends: Immigration, 2009 examined attitudes and policy preferences related to immigration in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The survey concentrated on issues such as: general perceptions of immigration and immigrants, perceptions of legal and illegal immigrants, the impact of immigration on society, admittance of immigrants, immigration policies, immigration and integration, decision-making level, socio-political rights, welfare, government evaluation and number of immigrants, interaction with immigrants, and economic crisis. In addition, a list experiment was implemented in this survey. Several questions were also asked pertaining to voting and politics including vote intention, political party attachment, whether candidate parties' agendas on immigration will influence their vote, and left-right political self-placement. Demographic and other background information includes age, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, origin of birth (personal and parental), religious affiliation, age when stopped full-time education and stage at which full-time education was completed, occupation, type of locality, region of residence, and language of interview. Please refer to the "Technical Note" in the ICPSR codebook for further information about weighting. ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.. Response Rates: The total response rate for all countries surveyed is 13 percent. Please refer to the "Technical Note" in the ICPSR codebook for additional information about response rate. The adult population aged 18 years and over, with access to a landline telephone in eight countries: Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. Smallest Geographic Unit: country (1) Stratified multi-stage random sampling (3 steps selection) was implemented. Sampling points were selected according to region and urbanization, and then random routes were conducted within these sampling points. (2) Random-digit dialing was implemented in all countries. Up to eight callbacks were used for each telephone number. The closest birthday rule was used to randomly select respondents within a household. computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI)The original data collection was carried out by TNS Opinion and Social -- Brussels, on request of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.The documentation and/or setup files may contain references to Poland, but Poland was not a participant in this Transatlantic Trends: Immigration survey. This collection contains no data for Poland.A split ballot was used for questions Q6, Q8, Q15, Q19, and Q25 in this survey. The variables Q6_SPLIT, Q8_SPLIT, Q15_SPLIT, Q19_SPLIT, and Q25_SPLIT define the separate groups for each of these questions. Additional information on the Transatlantic Trends Survey is provided on the Transatlantic Trends Web site.

Adjustment of Status Category Archives — Immigration Lawyer Blog Published by San Diego Immigration Attorney — Jacob J. Sapochnick | Published by San Diego Immigration Attorney — Jacob J. Sapochnick

As of 2020, the majority of immigrants living in the United States were Christians, with Christians making up 70 percent of the U.S. migrant population. A further 13 percent of U.S. migrants identified as religiously unaffiliated in that year, while seven percent identified as Muslims.

This data package includes the underlying data to replicate the charts and calculations presented in The effect of lawful crossing on unlawful crossing at the US southwest border, PIIE Working Paper 24-10.

If you use the data, please cite as: Clemens, Michael A. 2024. The effect of lawful crossing on unlawful crossing at the US southwest border. PIIE Working Paper 24-10. Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics.

As of 2023, 27.3 percent of California's population were born in a country other than the United States. New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Nevada rounded out the top five states with the largest population of foreign born residents in that year. For the country as a whole, 14.3 percent of residents were foreign born.

Mexican deportations from the United States have fluctuated significantly over the past decade and a half, with the highest numbers occurring during Barack Obama's first term. From 2009 to 2012, nearly 1.85 million Mexicans were deported, a figure that has since declined under subsequent administrations. The Biden administration has seen 824,018 Mexican nationals deported between 2021 and 2024, marking a slight increase from the Trump years. Recent trends in deportations While deportations saw a sharp decline during the pandemic years, they have since rebounded. In 2024 alone, 87,300 Mexicans were deported from the United States, indicating a renewed focus on immigration enforcement. This uptick in deportations comes amid a broader increase in unauthorized immigration, with an estimated 10.99 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2022, up from about 3.5 million in 1990. Refugees in Mexico The complexities of migration in the Americas extend beyond U.S.-Mexico dynamics. Mexico itself has become a significant host country for refugees, with approximately 124,784 refugees residing there in 2023. This represents a substantial increase from the previous year, driven largely by Venezuelan, Haitian, and Central American migrants. Honduras remains the primary country of origin for refugees in Mexico, with over 9,000 Hondurans granted refugee status in 2023, followed by Venezuela with 1,602 citizens.