Alex A. Ormaza
06/17/2005
It's a common assumption that every Hispanic looking male sitting
in front of a Seven Eleven to get a job is an illiterate, undocumented
migrant, whose family is still in a poor village on the so called
Third World. Surprise, surprise!
A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center shows that, in reality,
most of the unauthorized 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, and not only in manual labor in
agriculture or construction.
“Not all of the unauthorized population fits the stereotype
of a poorly educated manual laborer,” Jeffrey S. Passel, author
of the report, said.
The report, titled “Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics,”
offers a portrait of that population in unprecedented detail by examining
family composition, educational attainment, income and employment.
According to the report as of March 2004, 13.9 million persons, 4.7
million children, live in families in which the head of household
or the spouse is an unauthorized migrant. Some 3.2 million are US
citizens by birth but live in “mixed status” families,
where generally children are Americans and parents are unauthorized
aliens.
“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 unauthorized population,” said Roberto
Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research
center based in Washington DC.
At least 6.3 million unauthorized workers were employed as of March
2004, comprising 4.3 percent of the civilian labor force, the report
finds. Since 1986 it has been illegal for employers to hire workers
lacking proof of proper immigration status.
While 3 percent of unauthorized 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, unauthorized 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 unauthorized have at least
some college education and another quarter have finished high school.
Since the mid-1990s the number of unauthorized migrants arriving in
the United States has exceeded the number of new legal immigrants.
In recent years some 700,000 unauthorized migrants have arrived annually,
compared with about 610,000 legal immigrants.
The head of the US Border Patrol reported on June 7 that his agency
detained a record number of people who were not Mexican trying to
illegally cross the US southern border into the country.
"The United States continues to experience a rising influx in
other than Mexican nationals illegally entering the country,"
Border Patrol Chief Daniel Aguilar told a US Senate Committee.
In 2004 US officials repatriated some 160,000 foreign illegal immigrants,
said Wesley Lee with the Department of Homeland Security.
As of April 30 DHS had repatriated 75,510 foreigners for fiscal year
2005 -- which ends September 31 -- of which more than 45,000 had criminal
records, she said.
US officials did not give a breakdown by country of the non-Mexicans
caught at the border, but in the past most have come from Central
and South America.
According to the Pew's report, the education level of unauthorized
migrants arriving in recent years is higher than the levels of those
who have been in the country for a decade or more.
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