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Research Article

The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America, Yale School of Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America, Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America

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  • Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi, 
  • Jonathan S. Feinstein, 
  • Edward H. Kaplan

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  • Published: September 21, 2018
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193
  • Reader Comments

Fig 1

We apply standard demographic principles of inflows and outflows to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the best available data, including some that have only recently become available. Our analysis covers the years 1990 to 2016. We develop an estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants based on parameter values that tend to underestimate undocumented immigrant inflows and overstate outflows; we also show the probability distribution for the number of undocumented immigrants based on simulating our model over parameter value ranges. Our conservative estimate is 16.7 million for 2016, nearly fifty percent higher than the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million, which is based on survey data and thus different sources and methods. The mean estimate based on our simulation analysis is 22.1 million, essentially double the current widely accepted estimate. Our model predicts a similar trajectory of growth in the number of undocumented immigrants over the years of our analysis, but at a higher level. While our analysis delivers different results, we note that it is based on many assumptions. The most critical of these concern border apprehension rates and voluntary emigration rates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. These rates are uncertain, especially in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, which is when—both based on our modeling and the very different survey data approach—the number of undocumented immigrants increases most significantly. Our results, while based on a number of assumptions and uncertainties, could help frame debates about policies whose consequences depend on the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Citation: Fazel-Zarandi MM, Feinstein JS, Kaplan EH (2018) The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0201193. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193

Editor: Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Stanford University, UNITED STATES

Received: October 2, 2017; Accepted: July 10, 2018; Published: September 21, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 Fazel-Zarandi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper, its Supporting Information file, and accompanying Excel spreadsheet.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Immigration policy remains a hotly debated issue in the United States, with perhaps no aspect more controversial than how to address undocumented immigrants who do not have legal status. Policy debates about the amount of resources to devote to this issue, and the merits of alternative policies, including deportation, amnesty, and border control, depend critically on estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which sets the scale of the issue. The most widely accepted estimate of this number currently is approximately 11.3 million [ 1 , 2 ]. This estimate is based on variants of the residual method [ 2 – 4 ]. In this method, the size of the unauthorized immigrant population residing in the United States is set equal to the estimate of the total foreign-born population minus the legally resident foreign-born population. The total foreign-born population estimate is derived from surveys that ask respondents whether they were born outside of the United States (and whether they are American citizens), specifically either the American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey. The legally resident foreign-born population is estimated using administrative data on legal admissions.

An alternative approach to estimating the size of the undocumented population follows directly from basic demographic principles. Starting from a known population size at a given date, the population size at a future date equals the starting value plus the cumulative inflows minus the cumulative outflows. We employ this approach to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. for each year from 1990 to 2016, using the best available data and parameter values from the academic literature and government sources. Some of the information we use has been collected and made available only recently, so our approach is timely.

Our analysis has two main outputs. First, we generate what we call our conservative estimate, using parameter values that intentionally underestimate population inflows and overestimate population outflows, leading to estimates that will tend to underestimate the number of undocumented immigrants. Our conservative estimate for 2016 is 16.7 million, well above the estimate that is most widely accepted at present, which is for 2015 but should be comparable. Our model as well as most work in the literature indicates that the population size has been relatively stable since 2008; thus 2015 and 2016 are quite comparable. For our second step, recognizing that there is significant uncertainty about population flows, we simulate our model over a wide range of values for key parameters. These parameter values range from very conservative estimates to standard values in the literature. We sample values for each key parameter from uniform distributions over the ranges we establish. In our simulations, we also include Poisson population uncertainty conditional on parameter values, thus addressing the inherent variability in population flows. Our simulation results produce probability distributions over the number of undocumented immigrants for each year from 1990 to 2016. The results demonstrate that our conservative estimate falls towards the bottom of the probability distribution, at approximately the 2.5th percentile. The mean of the 2016 distribution is 22.1 million, which we take as the best overall estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants based on our modeling approach and current data. We also show the variability in our model based on the simulations for each year from 1990 through 2016.

The model works as follows (mathematical formulation, parameter values, and data sources underlying this model are detailed in the Supporting Information). For our conservative estimate we begin with a starting 1990 population of 3.5 million undocumented immigrants, in agreement with the standard estimate [ 1 ]. The estimate of 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in 1990 is based on applying the residual method (using the 1980 and 1990 censuses), described previously, which we argue systematically underestimates the population. Thus in assuming an initial population of 3.5 million, and centering our simulations around this value, we are almost certainly underestimating the size of the undocumented immigrant population at this date. In the simulations we assume that the starting population is drawn from a Poisson distribution with a mean of 3.5 million. It then follows that the population size at a future date equals the starting value plus the cumulative inflows minus the cumulative outflows.

Population inflows

Population inflows are decomposed into two streams: (I) undocumented immigrants who initially entered the country legally but have overstayed their visas; and (II) immigrants who have illegally crossed the border without being apprehended. We describe our approach for each source, explain the basis for our assumptions and why they are conservative, and list parameter ranges for the simulation.

(I) Visa overstays are estimated using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data for 2016, the first year for which visa overstays were comprehensively measured [ 5 ]. To apply this data in our context we also gather data for non-immigrant visas issued for all years from 1990 [ 6 ]. For our conservative estimate we assume that for each year the rate of overstays was equal to the 2016 rate. Calibration of our model shows that this assumption is in fact quite conservative. In particular, approximately 41% of undocumented immigrants based on the current survey data approach are visa overstayers [ 7 ], which translates to a visa overstay population of 4.6 million in 2015. Our model however predicts the number of overstayers to be less than this (even though our overall estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants is higher). That is, in our model most undocumented immigrants are not overstayers, and the model produces an estimate of the number of overstayers below the estimate produced in the conventional approach based on survey data. We compute that we would need to set the visa overstay rate above the DHS 2016 rate, specifically 1.1 times that rate, for our conservative estimate to generate as many overstayers as the 4.6 million in the 11.3 million estimate. Since many overstayers leave or adjust their status within a few months of their visa expiration date, we make a further conservative adjustment and count as overstayers only those individuals who have overstayed more than 1 year. For the simulation, we set the visa overstay rate equal to the 2016 rate multiplied by a uniform draw from the range [0.5,1.5]; consistent with the discussion above, this is a relatively conservative range.

(II) Illegal Border Crossers: We estimate illegal border crossers through application of the standard repeated trials (capture-recapture) model [ 8 – 10 ]. The model requires as inputs statistics on the total number of border apprehensions, the number of individuals apprehended more than once in a year (recidivist apprehensions), and estimates of the deterrence rate—the fraction of individuals who give up after being apprehended and do not attempt another crossing. Given these inputs, the repeated trials model generates estimates of: (i) the apprehension rate—the probability an individual is caught trying to cross the border; and (ii) the total number of individuals who are not apprehended (they may be caught one or more times but cross successfully on a later attempt) and enter the interior of the country illegally—the number of illegal border crossers in a year. We discuss data sources and potential weaknesses of this approach here; more information and mathematical details are provided in the Supporting Information.

DHS [ 10 , 11 ] provide figures for the total number of border apprehensions for every year in our timespan. They also provide information on the number of recidivist apprehensions and estimates of the deterrence rate for every year from 2005. Based on these figures and estimates they provide an estimate of the apprehension rate for each year from 2005 to 2015. Their estimate is 35% for 2005 and increases steadily, to above 50% by the end of the sample period. From their estimates we are able to derive directly estimates of the number of illegal border crossers for each of these years. For earlier years (1990 to 2004) we must make further assumptions. Our assumptions are about the apprehension and deterrence rates, since these have been addressed in the literature; in turn we are able to generate estimates of the number of illegal border crossers in earlier years based on these assumptions (see the Supporting Information for analytic details).

Most experts agree that the apprehension rate was significantly lower in earlier years [ 12 , 13 ]. A recent study [ 12 ] using data from the Mexican Migration Project estimates this rate for every year from 1990 to 2010; estimates in the 1990’s begin from the low twenties and range upwards to approximately 30%. A second study estimates the rate for 2003 at around 20% [ 13 ]. Given these estimates, and the general view that apprehension rates have risen, for our conservative estimate we assume that the apprehension rate in years 1990-2004 was equal to the average rate in years 2005-10 or 39%; this is well above the rates discussed in the literature for earlier years and thus tends to reduce our estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants since it implies a larger fraction are apprehended at the border. For our simulation we assume a uniform distribution over the range [0.25,0.40] for the earlier years, still above the average rates in the literature for these years.

Additional facts support the view that the apprehension rate has increased in recent years. The number of border agents has increased dramatically over the timespan of our analysis [ 14 ], and the number of hours spent by border agents patrolling the immediate border area has increased by more than 300% between 1992- 2004 [ 15 ]. Further, new infrastructure (e.g., fences) and technologies (e.g., night vision equipment, sensors, and video imaging systems) were also introduced during this period [ 15 ]. Thus the apprehension rate we use for earlier years almost certainly overstates the actual apprehension rate and therefore underestimates the number of successful crossings. However, we note that these additional border resources may have been concentrated in certain locations and it remains a possibility that apprehension rates were higher in earlier years. We note finally that in using data only on Southern Border crossings we again are conservative in our approach, not accounting for illegal crossings along other borders.

Notwithstanding our view that we make conservative choices in setting up our model and parameter values, we acknowledge that border apprehension rates for the 1990’s are not based on as well-developed data sources as estimates for more recent years. Thus it remains a possibility that these rates are higher than we believe. One aspect of this uncertainty concerns deterrence. When deterrence is higher border crossings will fall. Most researchers believe deterrence has increased in recent years [ 8 , 12 ]. We note that reference [ 12 ] estimates that the probability of eventual entry after multiple attempts on a single trip in the 1990s is close to one, indicating almost no deterrence in the earlier period. One piece of evidence in support of this is data on the voluntary return rate, which refers to the percentage of individuals apprehended at the border who are released back to their home country without going through formal removal proceedings and not being subjected to further penalties. Voluntary returns are thus not “punished” and thus are less likely to be deterred from trying to cross the border in the future, compared with individuals who are subjected to stronger penalties. The voluntary return rate has fallen in recent years, from 98% between 2000 and 2004 to 84% between 2005 and 2010. Thus, at least based on this measure deterrence efforts have increased. However, this does not conclusively demonstrate that deterrence was lower in earlier years and it remains a possibility that it was higher, which would tend to reduce our estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants. In conclusion we note that although there is much uncertainty about the border apprehension rate, it would have to be very high, above 60% for earlier years, in order to generate estimates of the 2015 population of undocumented immigrants in the range of the current widely accepted estimate of just over 11 million (this is based on analyzing our model using the conservative estimate values for all other parameters). This seems implausible based on our reading of the literature.

Population outflows

Population outflows are broken into four categories: (I) voluntary emigration; (II) mortality; (III) deportation; and (IV) change of status from unauthorized to lawful.

(I) Voluntary emigration rates are the largest source of outflow and the most uncertain based on limited data availability. It is well accepted that voluntary emigration rates decline sharply with time spent in the country [ 16 ]; thus we employ separate emigration rates for those who have spent one year or less in the U.S., 2-10 years, or longer. We use the following values for our conservative estimate. First, for those who have spent one year or less we assume a voluntary emigration rate of 40%. This estimate is based on data for the first-year visa overstay exit rate (the fraction of overstayers who left the country within one year from the day their visa expired) for 2016 [ 17 ], which is in the lower thirty percent range (the rate for 2015 is similar). We note that the rate for visa overstayers is very likely a substantial overestimate for illegal border crossers, who are widely viewed as having a lower likelihood of exiting in the first year, especially in more recent years [ 12 ]. The 40% first-year emigration rate that we assume is well above the standard values in the literature [ 4 , 12 , 16 , 18 ], which range from 1% to 25%. Hence this assumption contributes to making our estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants in the country a conservative one. For years 2-10 we assume a rate of 4% per year. This is the upper bound among estimates in the literature, which lie between 0.01 to 0.04 [ 4 , 16 , 18 ]. Lastly, for years 10 and above, published estimates of the emigration rate typically fall around 1%; we set this rate to 1% per year in line with these estimates. Note that given the extremely high 40% emigration rate that we assume for those who have only been in the country for one year or less, overall annual emigration rates in our model simulation are significantly higher than those found in the literature or government sources. To further enhance the conservatism of our model, we assume that all undocumented immigrants present at the beginning of 1990 have been here for only one year.

For our simulation analysis we divide first-year voluntary emigration into two categories, visa overstayers and illegal border crossers. For visa overstayers we assume the first-year rate falls in the range [.25,.50] (uniform) for each year; based on the discussion in the preceding paragraph and literature cited there, this is a relatively conservative range with midpoint 37.5% above nearly all accepted estimates. For illegal border crossers there is data indicating that first-year voluntary emigration rates vary across cohorts [ 12 ] (we are not aware of such data for visa overstayers). To incorporate this, we assume that a voluntary emigration rate is drawn for each cohort year from a uniform distribution that is specific to that cohort’s year of initial entry; the lower bound of this range is set by the numbers in [ 12 ] and the upper bound is set at 0.50. Again our assumptions here are conservative, since we use an accepted value in the literature as our lower bound and allow emigration rates to range to very high values. For years 2-10 and 10 and above we use the same distributions for overstayers and illegal border crossers. For years 2-10 we draw a value from the range [.01, .05], for which the mean value of 3% is relatively high and thus conservative; and for years 10 and above we draw a value from the range [.005,.02], thus centered slightly above the standard value in the literature. We note that the first-year rate is the most critical for our analysis.

An important issue is circular flow of migrants, which refers to individuals who enter the country, then exit temporarily and re-enter a short time later. There is limited numerical data for circular flow rates. However, it is logical and recognized in the literature [ 12 ] that when border apprehension rates are higher circular flow rates for border crossers tend to diminish: Given it will be more difficult to re-enter the country successfully later, illegal border crossers in the country will tend not to leave for temporary reasons. Thus this issue is important for illegal border crossers (but not likely to be as relevant for visa overstayers). Thus in our simulation we impose a negative correlation between the first-year emigration rate and the border apprehension rate for illegal border crossers; based on our own analysis for annual data from the best recent study [ 12 ] we use a correlation of -0.5 (see the Supporting Information for details). We note that this correlation does not substantially change the range or mean of our simulation results, but does reduce the variance.

(II) The mortality rate applied is the age-adjusted mortality rate reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [ 19 ]. For our conservative estimate we set this value at 0.7 percent, and for the simulation we draw a value from the range [0.5,1.0] percent. We view these values as conservative. Experts in the field argue that this rate overestimates mortality among undocumented immigrants [ 4 ]. To further check that our mortality rate assumptions are an overestimate and thus contribute to making our overall estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants conservative, we combined the age, gender, and country of birth distributions of undocumented immigrants reported in [ 2 , 20 ] with CDC mortality rates [ 19 ]. The resulting mortality rate is much lower than the mortality rate we assume (see the Supporting Information for details). We note that the mortality rate is low relative to the voluntary emigration rate, and thus a less important parameter for the calculation we make.

Lastly, (III) the annual number of deportations is taken directly from DHS annual statistics [ 11 , 21 ] for each year. (IV) The number of undocumented immigrants who change to legal status in each year is also taken directly from published data [ 4 , 11 ]. We include the number of deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) recipients as population outflows even though such individuals remain technically undocumented, which again serves to underestimate the size of the population.

Simulation methodology

Our simulation is designed to evaluate the range of outcomes the model produces, thus taking into account important sources of variability. There are two main sources of uncertainty: parameter uncertainty, and inherent population variability conditional upon a set of parameter values. We take both sources into account, but note that the first source is the main factor contributing to the variability of the population distribution in the model.

We address parameter uncertainty by establishing ranges for key parameters. As documented above, these key parameters are (i) the visa overstay rate; (ii) the border apprehension rate for individuals attempting to cross the border illegally; (iii) the voluntary emigration rate, which is set separately for illegal border crossers and visa overstayers for the first year and then jointly for years 2-10 and years 10 and above, and for which we establish a cohort-specific range for each annual cohort for the first-year rate for illegal border crossers; and (iv) the mortality rate. For each parameter, we establish a uniform distribution over the set range (and impose a negative correlation between the border apprehension rate and first-year voluntary emigration rate for illegal border crossers). Then, in each simulation run we sample a value for each parameter from its underlying distribution. All of the ranges for the parameter distributions have been specified in the preceding sections. We also sample a value for the initial population of undocumented immigrants in 1990 from a Poisson distribution with a mean of 3.5 million, the most widely accepted estimate of the population of undocumented immigrants as of that date. See the Supporting Information for further details.

To model inherent population uncertainty given a set of parameter values, we impose a Poisson structure on our model. Specifically, the population in a particular year, conditional on a set of parameter values, is represented as the sum of all individuals who have entered the country in previous years and have remained in the country from their year of arrival until the particular year in question. The number of entries (in Poisson terminology, arrivals) in any year is drawn from a Poisson distribution with mean dependent upon the underlying parameter values governing apprehension probabilities and visa overstays for that year, while the probability that a new immigrant remains in the country from entry until the particular year in question is determined based on the parameters governing voluntary emigration, mortality, deportation and change-of-status rates. It follows (see the Supporting Information for mathematical details) that the number of individuals who enter the country in any given year and are still in the country at some future date will also follow a Poisson distribution. Further, the number of individuals who enter in any given year and remain in the country at a future time can be considered to be statistically independent given the underlying parameter values (see the Supporting Information for details). Thus, the population of undocumented immigrants in a particular year, which is the sum of those who have entered in past years and are still in the country in the particular year in question, also follows a Poisson distribution, for the sum of independent Poisson random variables is itself Poisson distributed.

We ran 1,000,000 trials simulating the model. For each trial we recorded the total number of undocumented immigrants predicted to be in the U.S. in each year from 1990 through 2016 for that trial.

Following suggestions made by the Academic Editor based on comments made by a reviewer, we performed an additional set of simulations making even more conservative assumptions about net inflows over the period 1990-98. This is the period for which there is significant uncertainty about net inflows of undocumented immigrants. Specifically, we calibrated the model such that the net inflows are half a million per year over this period (in line with the residual method’s estimates during this period) and computed the pooled number of undocumented immigrants at the end of 1998 based on this approach. We then simulated our model forward from that point using the same framework described above.

Fig 1 depicts our results for year 2016, the most recent year for which we are able to produce an estimate. The graph depicts the relative frequency of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.; it is a smoothed version of the histogram we generate based on simulating our model 1,000,000 times. The figure also shows our conservative estimate of 16.7 million in Red, and the most widely accepted estimate heretofore of 11.3 million in Blue on the far left. We note that this last estimate is for 2015, but should be comparable since both the estimates based on the survey approach and our modeling approach indicate that the number of undocumented immigrants has remained relatively constant in recent years. Finally, the mean estimate of 22.1 million is shown in black in the center of the distribution. It is clear from the Figure that based on the data we use, our assumptions, and our demographic model, the currently accepted estimate falls outside the range of likely values. And our conservative estimate is indeed conservative based on our modeling approach and parameter ranges, lying at approximately the 2.5th percentile of the probability distribution.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193.g001

Fig 2 displays our simulation results for each year from 1990 through 2016. Our conservative estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants for each year is shown in Red, the most widely accepted estimate (through 2015) is shown in Blue, and the mean value we estimate for each year is shown in Black. The results show that our model estimates follow a similar shaped trajectory as the widely accepted current estimates do, but grow faster and are well above those estimates for every year.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193.g002

The results of our analysis are clear: The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is estimated to be substantially larger than has been appreciated at least in widely accepted previous estimates. Even an estimate based on what we view as conservative assumptions, in some cases unrealistically so, generates an estimate of 16.7 million, well above the conventional estimate of 11.3 million. The mean of our simulations, which range over more standard but still conservative parameter values, is 22.1 million, essentially twice the current widely accepted estimate; the ninety-five percent probability interval is [16.2,29.5].

Even for the scenario presuming net inflows of 0.5 million per year for 1990-98 our results still exceed the current estimates substantially. The mean estimate is 17.0 million with a 95% probability interval of 13.5 million to 21.1 million. The conservative estimate for this scenario is 14.0 million, still significantly above the widely accepted estimate of 11.3 million.

It is currently fairly widely accepted that there are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. This estimate, derived from population surveys and legal immigration records, has formed the backdrop for the immigration policy debate in the United States. Using a different approach grounded in operational data, and demographic and mathematical modeling, we have arrived at higher estimates of the undocumented immigrant population.

A possible explanation for the discrepancy in these results is that the survey-based approach taken in [ 2 – 4 ] must surmount two challenges. First, it requires reaching a representative sample of all those born outside of the United States. Second, it requires accurate responses from survey respondents when asked where they were born, and whether they are American citizens. It is plausible that undocumented immigrants are more difficult to locate (and survey) than other foreign-born residents of the United States, and if contacted, undocumented immigrants might misreport their country of origin, citizenship, and/or number of household residents fearing the possible consequences of revealing their true status. Any of these circumstances would lead to underestimating the true number of undocumented immigrants.

Our approach, summarized above and detailed in the Supporting Information, is grounded in fundamental principles of demographic flows. The size of any population can be represented as its initial value plus cumulative inflows minus cumulative outflows. We have specialized this approach to the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, and have drawn upon previously unavailable data. From border apprehensions and visa overstays, it is possible to infer the number of new undocumented arrivals by reversing the flow: how many new arrivals are necessary in order to see the number of apprehensions and visa overstayers observed? Similarly, consideration of deportations, voluntary emigration, mortality and change-of-status enables one to infer the duration of stay in the country from the time of arrival. Together, this logic enables reconstructing the arrival and departure processes governing population inflows and outflows that result in the population of undocumented immigrants in the country.

In developing estimates we have attempted to utilize parameter values that understate inflows and overstate outflows. Our results are most sensitive to the assumptions we make about the probability of border apprehension and the voluntary emigration rates of undocumented immigrants leaving the United States. Further research could explore in greater detail the impact of assumptions about these parameters on estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants. To explore the uncertainty of our estimates we have conducted extension simulations over parameters, simulating 1 million different population trajectories; further research could widen the ranges of parameters and consider additional parameter uncertainty. Further research could also analyze inflows and outflows based on country of origin.

Our results lead us to the conclusion that the widely accepted estimate of 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States is too small. Our model estimates indicate that the true number is likely to be larger, with an estimated ninety-five percent probability interval ranging from 16.2 to 29.5 million undocumented immigrants.

Supporting information

S1 file. supporting material..

Contains the mathematical model, parameter values, and data sources underlying the model.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193.s001

S2 File. Excel file.

The spreadsheet used to calculate the conservative estimate.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193.s002

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  • Original article
  • Open access
  • Published: 27 September 2017

Illegal immigration and media exposure: evidence on individual attitudes

  • Giovanni Facchini 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 8 ,
  • Anna Maria Mayda   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0094-2586 3 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 &
  • Riccardo Puglisi 6 , 9  

IZA Journal of Development and Migration volume  7 , Article number:  14 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Illegal immigration has been the focus of much debate in receiving countries, but little is known about the drivers of individual attitudes towards illegal immigrants. To study this question, we use the CCES survey, which was carried out in 2006 in the USA. We find evidence that—in addition to standard labor market and welfare state considerations—media exposure is significantly correlated with public opinion on illegal immigration. Controlling for education, income, ideology, and other socio-demographic characteristics, individuals watching Fox News are 9 percentage points more likely than CBS viewers to oppose the legalization of undocumented immigrants. We find an effect of the same size and direction for CNN viewers, whereas individuals watching PBS are instead more likely to support legalization. Ideological self-selection into different news programs plays an important role, but cannot entirely explain the correlation between media exposure and attitudes about illegal immigration.

1 Introduction

Immigration is one of the most salient policy issues in the USA. Gallup polls conducted in May 2006 and May 2007 show that immigration was considered the second most important problem facing the country, with, respectively, 13 and 24% of respondents mentioning it. As the number of undocumented immigrants has increased ( Passel 2005 ), much of the recent discussion has focused on illegal immigration. While a small literature is emerging which tries to measure the costs and benefits of illegal immigration ( Hanson 2006 ), little is known on the factors that influence individual attitudes towards this facet of globalization. The purpose of this paper is to carry out what, to the best of our knowledge, is the first national-level systematic study of the determinants of public opinion on illegal immigration and, in particular, of the role played by the media in shaping these attitudes. 1

To undertake our analysis, we use the newly released Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), 2 an individual-level survey conducted immediately before and after the 2006 midterm elections. At that time, two legislative initiatives on illegal immigration were being considered in the US Congress. The bill discussed in the House (H.R. 4437) focused on border enforcement and deportation of illegal immigrants. The Senate proposal (S. 2611) contained instead a more complex set of initiatives. Besides calling for increased security, it expanded the number of guest workers and, importantly, it introduced a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants.

The CCES contains two questions which are particularly suited for the purpose of our study. The first one asks each respondent to state whether he/she would have voted for the Senate plan. The second one, which was asked only to a subsample of the population, directly compares the House and the Senate proposal. We use answers to these questions to assess the views of each respondent on illegal immigration. In analyzing the drivers of individual attitudes, we focus on the role played by the media, while controlling for the other standard economic and noneconomic drivers which have been highlighted in the literature. The CCES is unique for our purpose as, besides providing a wealth of information on the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, it also contains information on the TV evening news program they most frequently watch (ABC World News, CBS Evening News, CNN, Fox News, PBS The NewsHour, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and others). To investigate the role played by the actual content of the newscast, we have supplemented this information with content coverage data obtained from the Dow Jones Factiva online archive.

To carry out our empirical analysis, we estimate a series of probit regressions. In our main specification, the dependent variable is a pro-Senate plan dummy, which is constructed from answers to the first policy question described above. Controlling for other economic and noneconomic drivers, we find that media exposure plays an important role in shaping public opinion on illegal immigration. According to our estimates, respondents watching Fox News are 9 percentage points more likely to oppose the lenient Senate plan (relative to CBS viewers). This result is broadly consistent with the findings of recent studies on the political position and the persuasive role of Fox News ( Groseclose and Milyo 2005 ; DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007 ). Perhaps surprisingly, we find that CNN viewers entertain an attitude towards illegal immigration which is very similar to the one displayed by Fox News viewers. This result might be explained by a “Lou Dobbs” effect. 3 Instead, the opposite effect holds for PBS viewers, who are 14 percentage points more likely, relative to CBS viewers, to support the Senate plan. It is important to notice that ideological self-selection into different news channels plays a relevant role, but does not completely explain the correlation between media exposure and policy attitudes on illegal immigration. In fact, when controlling for self-reported ideology and party identification, the estimated effect for Fox News and PBS is significantly smaller in absolute value than when not controlling for these variables but still large and highly significant. 4 In addition, and most importantly, the estimated effect for CNN is larger in absolute value when controlling for self-reported ideology and party identification. This means that, in the case of CNN, the impact of the news program works in the opposite direction with respect to self-selection, and thus, the coefficient on CNN is if anything biased towards zero due to self-selection. These results give us confidence that our correlations are at least in part driven by the causal impact of media exposure. In addition, we also find that the count of stories covering migration in a given evening news program has a negative and significant impact on the propensity to support the Senate plan: this result is also unlikely to be driven by self-selection since the number of stories covering migration should not be a decisive factor in the choice of the evening news program watched.

When forming their opinion about a certain issue, individuals are also influenced by the real-world events pertaining to that issue ( Behr and Iyengar 1985 ). Our findings are consistent with this framework: controlling for media coverage and other confounding factors—e.g., the state-level fraction of legal immigrants—individuals living in states with a larger fraction of illegal immigrants are significantly more favorable to the Senate plan. The estimated correlation is quantitatively significant: an additional 1 percentage point in the fraction of illegal immigrants is associated with a 1 percentage point increase in the propensity to support the Senate plan.

We also find that economic drivers play an important role. In particular, individuals are more favorable to the Senate’s “more lenient” plan if they are more skilled and richer. To better interpret these results, we also run the same regressions using—as the dependent variable—the dummy constructed from answers to the second policy question, which explicitly asks respondents to compare the Senate and the House plan. Our findings in the two sets of specifications are very similar. This suggests that—when answering the question about the Senate plan—respondents have in mind the House plan as the alternative.

Our result that more skilled individuals are more favorable to the Senate plan is in line with the existing literature on the drivers of attitudes towards overall migration. Compared to the House plan, the Senate plan increases the labor market competition faced by unskilled workers, both by being more lenient on deportations as well as by legalizing illegal workers, thus broadening their employability across sectors. Since illegal immigrants are mostly unskilled, both these effects increase the relative supply of unskilled labor. 5 The positive impact of individual skill is then consistent with the existence of labor market complementarities between skilled and unskilled labor, which have been shown to be important drivers of attitudes by Scheve and Slaughter (2001) , Mayda (2006) , O’Rourke and Sinnott (2006 ), and Ortega and Polavieja (2012) . 6

Our findings suggest also that the welfare state plays an important role in shaping attitudes towards legalization as richer individuals are more likely to support the Senate plan. A plausible explanation of this result is that both poor and rich individuals feel penalized by the Senate plan through the welfare state channel—since they perceive legalization as worsening the position of public finances. However, the poor are more affected than the rich, because they expect benefits to fall, either in quantity or quality, and they use public services relatively more than the rich.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 , we review the related literature, while in Section 3 , we provide some background information about illegal immigration in the USA and the two legislative proposals discussed by the US Congress during 2006. In Section 4 , we describe the data. The results of our statistical analysis are discussed in Section 5 , while Section 6 is devoted to a series of robustness checks. Section 7 concludes.

2 Related literature

This paper is related to two strands of the literature. The first looks at the impact of the media on policy preferences, whereas the second considers the various drivers of individual attitudes towards immigration.

A vast body of literature, both in economics and political science, has studied how the media can shape policy preferences. In particular, political science and communication scholars have highlighted three main channels. First, several studies have focused on the agenda-setting power of the media, according to which the amount of coverage devoted to a particular issue can influence the importance readers and/or viewers attach to it ( McCombs and Shaw 1972 ). 7 Second, as noted by McCombs (2002) , the media not only can make an issue more salient by increasing coverage but it can also emphasize particular attributes of the issue itself. The theory of priming thus describes how readers and viewers, when assessing a situation or individual, are pushed towards giving a larger weight to the aspect emphasized by the media. 8 Similarly, framing refers to how the media can associate an issue to another, in order to affect an individual’s perception. 9

Turning to the economics literature, recent analyses—taking as given and known the ideological position of a media outlet—have tried to measure the media’s persuasion effect by exploiting experimental or quasi-experimental settings on the degree to which individuals are exposed to that outlet. 10 For instance, DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) find that the gradual introduction of Fox News in cable markets has increased the Republican vote share in presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Using an experimental setting, Gerber et al. (2008) do not find instead any significantly different effect of exposure to the Washington Times vs. the Washington Post on the Democratic vote in the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial elections. 11

Moving from the general impact of the media to the impact on preferences—specifically on a given policy—exposure to different media sources might affect individual support by altering the balance between “considerations” that are favorable and/or unfavorable to that policy ( Zaller 1992 ). As far as attitudes towards immigration are concerned, the agenda-setting power of the media can influence them through two different channels. First, individuals might hold views on the phenomenon, which are “activated” only when migration is made salient by media coverage. Second, the timing of the coverage might matter. An ideologically biased media could strategically devote more attention to migration only in the presence of “bad” events related to it, and disregard it in the presence of “good” events, to highlight the foreigners’ negative impact on the community. 12 Third, priming and framing choices by the media might exert a direct effect on attitudes. 13 A media outlet can decide to systematically frame the immigration issue in a negative or positive fashion, thus affecting the point of view entertained by their audience and ultimately their feelings about the issue. This mechanism could work independently of the overall amount of coverage.

Two recent papers explicitly investigate the link between media exposure and migration attitudes. Abrajano and Singh (2009) focus on Spanish-speaking individuals in the USA and show—in a cross-sectional exercise—that those watching Spanish-language channels display more positive attitudes on migration than those watching English-language ones. De Philippis (2009 ) matches instead individual-level data from the European Social Survey with country-level data on media coverage of immigration from the Dow Jones Factiva. She finds that—controlling for economic and cultural drivers—individuals are significantly less favorable to immigration when media outlets in their country more frequently portray immigration within a controversial frame.

Besides media exposure, several studies have emphasized the role of other drivers of preferences towards immigration, both economic and noneconomic ones. Particular emphasis has been put on the importance of labor market competition and of the redistribution carried out by the welfare state in shaping preferences. Concerning the former, Scheve and Slaughter (2001) and Kessler (2001) find that, in the USA, more educated individuals are more likely to be pro-immigration, a result which is consistent with the evidence that immigrants to that country are on average less skilled than natives. 14 Similar results have also been obtained by Mayda (2006) and O’Rourke and Sinnott (2006 ) for a set of developed and developing countries, using the variation in the relative skill distribution of migrants to natives across countries. Immigration-receiving countries are often characterized by large welfare states, and the impact of immigration on individual preferences through this channel has been studied by several papers. For instance, Hanson et al. (2007) , Facchini and Mayda (2009) , and Dustmann and Preston (2007) find strong evidence that welfare state considerations matter in shaping attitudes on overall immigration—using variation in the extent of redistribution carried out across US states as well as across advanced Western economies.

Immigration attitudes are also influenced by noneconomic, cultural factors. Hainmueller and Hiscox (2007) and Hainmueller and Hiscox (2010) have emphasized that more educated immigrants might be more pro-migration because they are more open towards different cultures, more cosmopolitan, and more tolerant, and not just because they fear less competition in the labor market from unskilled immigrants. Furthermore, as pointed out by Dustmann and Preston (2007) , “differences” between the immigrant and the native population might induce a more negative appraisal of immigration, to the extent that natives fear a dilution of nation-specific characteristics and/or have a preference for cultural (and ethnic) homogeneity. In particular, the results for Great Britain obtained by Dustmann and Preston (2007) suggest that racist feelings have a particularly strong effect on attitudes towards overall migration. More generally, Card et al. (2012) consider the relative role of economic factors and “compositional amenities”—i.e., a broad class of externalities arising from the fact that people value the characteristics of their neighbors and co-workers, which are fundamentally changed by immigration. Importantly, they find that both dimensions play a significant role but that compositional amenities explain 3–5 times more of the individual variation in attitudes towards immigration.

Summing up, a substantial literature has investigated the drivers of public opinion on overall immigration. At the same time, little is known on what shapes attitudes towards illegal immigration, even though this phenomenon is at the forefront of the political debate. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap, focusing on the role played by the media in shaping them.

3 Illegal immigration in the USA

Generally speaking, illegal immigration refers to labor movements across national borders taking place in a way that violates the immigration laws of the destination country. Assessing the number of illegal immigrants residing in the USA involves some educated guessing. It is well known that illegal aliens do respond to government surveys such as the Current Population Survey or the decennial Census. While the CPS and Census do not ask explicitly whether the foreign-born is legally or illegally present in the country, a wide range of research institutes and the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) within the Department of Homeland Security have constructed estimates of the number of illegal immigrants, for example, based on the socio-economic characteristics available in the CPS or Census data. The most common method to estimate the number of illegal immigrants is to take the difference between the measured immigrant population and the sum of past legal immigration flows. Estimates obtained using this methodology vary substantially, 15 but as of January 2006, the OIS reports that there were 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants in the USA. Of these, 4.2 millions had entered in 2000 or later, and close to 60% of the total number of illegal immigrants was from Mexico.

The number of illegals has been steadily increasing from the early nineties until today. Many estimates suggest that, between 1995 and 2005, the inflows of unauthorized migrants—at over 700,000 per year—have actually been larger than those of legal arrivals ( Passel 2005 ). Importantly, the distribution of illegals is highly concentrated. According to the OIS estimates, the ten states which were the largest recipients of undocumented immigrants accounted for approximately three quarters of the total, and California and Texas alone had more than four million illegal aliens in 2006. This is not surprising, as the two states share a border with Mexico, and at least since 1990, the vast majority of immigrants from that country are illegally living in the USA ( Passel 2005 ).

To understand the impact of illegal immigrants on domestic residents, it is important to analyze the socio-economic characteristics of these individuals. Recent estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center ( Passel 2005 ) suggest that the following stylized facts hold: (1) unauthorized immigrants are younger than both natives and legal immigrants; (2) they are substantially less educated than both natives and legal immigrants; (3) they work in lower wage occupations, and they earn substantially less than natives and legal migrants in the same occupations; (4) they are concentrated in a relatively small number of industries; 16 (5) poverty rates among illegals are particularly high; and (6) well over 50% of illegal immigrants do not have health insurance.

As a response to the rapid increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the last 10 years, two important pieces of legislation have been introduced on the Congress floor between 2005 and 2006. “The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act” of 2005 (H.R. 4437, i.e., what we labeled the House plan in Section 1 ) was presented on June 12, 2005, by the Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner. The legislation was passed by the US House of Representatives on December 16, 2005, by a vote of 239 to 182 (with 92% of Republicans supporting it and 82% of Democrats opposing it), but it did not pass the Senate. Its main goal was to reduce illegal immigration flows, by introducing a series of measures ranging from the construction of 700 miles of reinforced fencing along the US–Mexico border to making it a crime to live in the USA illegally. The proposal was the catalyst of many immigrant rights protests, which culminated on April 10, 2006, when demonstrations against the bill and its provisions were carried out in 102 American cities.

The second bill, “The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act” (CIRA, S. 2611, i.e., what we label the Senate plan in Section 1 ) was instead a US Senate bill introduced by Democrat Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania on April 7, 2006. This bill took a more comprehensive approach to immigration reform and can be considered a compromise attempt after the failed introduction of the so-called Kennedy–McCain proposal of 2005 (S. 1033). Its main goal was also to increase security along the US southern border with Mexico, but it contained important additional provisions. In particular, it called for an expansion of the number of guest workers over and above those already present in the USA, through a new “blue card” visa program, and for allowing long-time illegal immigrants to gain legal status. This would have been the second major legalization initiative in 20 years, after the one included in the 1986 “Immigration Reform and Control Act.” The bill was passed by the Senate on May 25, 2006, by a vote of 62-36. More details on both measures are reported in Table  1 .

While neither bill became law because they failed to pass the conference committee, they have been important catalysts for the immigration debate of that period. Thus, understanding the drivers of individual views on these measures will provide us with valuable information on how illegal immigration is perceived.

In this study, we use the 2006 round of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which was conducted by YouGov/Polimetrix of Palo Alto, California, and is the result of the joint effort of researchers in 30 US universities. The survey was carried out via the Internet and is based on a matched random sample, which has been constructed following a two-step procedure. First, a very large number of people—over 150,000 individuals—were recruited to participate in the online survey. Second, a random sample was drawn from the consumer samples available to YouGov/Polimetrix—which are representative of the US population—and the characteristics of these individuals were recorded. A subset of the respondents to the online survey were then selected by matching them—based on a set of demographic characteristics—to the individuals randomly drawn from the population (i.e., from the consumer files), using age, race, gender, income, education, and media usage. Propensity scores were then developed to ensure that the sample would match the characteristics of the US adult population as reflected in the 2004 Current Population Survey. 17

The Internet-based design has the important advantage of allowing researchers to base their analysis on a large sample of 36,421 individuals. As all survey designs, it faces some important limitations. In particular, as has been pointed out by Hill et al. (2007) , the approach followed by Polimetrix does not attempt to match respondents to target populations on political engagement or partisan commitment. Still, methodological analyses have concluded that “[...]although the opt-in Internet sample we analyze does have some bias, the bias is probably not so great as to vitiate the gains of inexpensive, large and targeted samples that the Internet methodology makes possible[...]” ( Hill et al. 2007 ). The CCES has already been used in several papers, ranging from the analysis of the determinants of US trade policy carried out by Guisinger (2009) to the study of the causes and consequences of public misperceptions of the size of the US immigrant population carried out by Citrin and Sides (2008) .

The main dependent variable in our empirical analysis is the answer to a question about whether the respondent is in favor of the Senate plan, which offered a path to legalization and citizenship to illegal immigrants. The exact wording is as follows: “Another issue is illegal immigration. One plan considered by the Senate would offer illegal immigrants who already live in the U.S. more opportunities to become legal citizens. Some politicians argue that people who have worked hard in jobs that the economy depends on should be offered the chance to live here legally. Other politicians argue that the plan is an amnesty that rewards people who have broken the law. What do you think? If you were faced with this decision, would you vote for or against this proposal?” We create a pro_lenient_plan dummy variable which equals 1 if the respondent answers he would have voted for the Senate proposal and 0 if he/she would have turned it down. We exclude from the analysis those who have answered “don’t know.” 18

There is an additional question in the CCES regarding the respondent’s likely vote on alternative illegal immigration proposals. In this case, the respondent is asked to give his comparative opinion about the Senate and the House plan. The exact wording of the question is as follows: “Congress has been debating different policies concerning immigration reform. The Senate proposal has a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The House proposal, on the other hand, contains stricter enforcement and deportation of undocumented aliens. Which of these two items of reform do you think is more important?” We create a pro_lenient_plan2 dummy variable which equals 1 if the respondent answers he would have voted for the Senate proposal and 0 if he/she would have voted for the House plan. We therefore exclude from the analysis those who have answered “Don’t know.” Since this question was asked to a subsample of 16,231 respondents (i.e., not to the entire sample but only to those who were interviewed in the pilot study, held in August 2006), we rely on this question solely for robustness checks of the main results.

Regarding media exposure, respondents are first asked to state the frequency with which they watched a national evening news program in the week before the interview. For those who watched a news program at least once, there is an additional question, which asks them to mention the most frequently watched network for national evening news. 19 We create separate dummies for each most frequently watched network and an additional dummy for those who did not watch a national evening news program (the no_evening_news dummy).

The CCES survey also contains information on the age, gender, education, household income, employment status, immigration status, and political views of respondents. Education is coded according to a 1–6 ordered scale, with a value of 1 for those who have not completed high school and 6 for those with a post-graduate degree. Individuals are asked to classify their own income along a discrete scale of 14 income “brackets,” with interval size increasing from $5,000 to $30,000. 20 Previous research ( Scheve and Slaughter 2001 ; Mayda 2006 ) shows that the correlation between education and immigration attitudes is a function of labor force participation. Building on a question on employment status, we thus construct a dummy variable which equals 1 when the respondent belongs to the labor force, i.e., he/she is working full time or part time or is unemployed, and 0 otherwise.

Another question in the CCES survey provides information on the immigration status of the respondent. We use it for two different purposes: first, we exclude from the statistical analysis those who declare to be immigrants; second, for those who are US citizens and hence are included in our analysis, we use the question in order to extract some information on the family origin of the respondent. More specifically, we create a discrete variable ( immigrant origin ) on a 1–3 ordered scale, with a value of 1 for those whose parents and grandparents are US citizens; a value of 2 for those whose parents are US citizens, but at least one grandparent is an immigrant; and a value of 3 for those who declare that at least one of their parents is foreign-born.

Regarding political controls, the CCES survey has a question on self-reported ideology: individuals are asked to locate themselves on an ideological 0–100 scale, ranging from 0 for extremely liberal views to 100 for extremely conservative ones. Moreover, there are two variables measuring the party identification of the respondent. The first variable is a 3-point scale party id variable, which equals −1 for self-identified Democrats, 0 for Independents, and 1 for Republicans. The second variable is a 7-point scale indicator, ranging from 1 for strong Democrats to 7 for strong Republicans.

One might consider religion as an organized system of beliefs which could be systematically correlated with attitudes regarding policy issues. Among others, the CCES survey contains a question about the religious preferences of the respondent and one about the frequency of church attendance. We recode the church attendance variable as an ordinal one, which ranges from a value of 0 for those who declare to go to church “never or almost never” to a value of 3 for those who (declare to) go at least once a week or more. Moreover, the survey also includes a question on the perceived importance of religion in everyday life. In Section 6 , we explore whether our baseline results are robust to controlling for the religious attitudes of respondents.

Whether the respondent lives in an urban, suburban, or rural area might be correlated with the type and frequency of encounters with illegal immigrants and hence with his/her views on the issue. Also, it can be correlated with other unobserved features of his/her political views. Since respondents are not asked about their location in terms of urban, suburban, or rural area but are asked about their county of residence, we match the CCES data with county-level information, which are taken from the ICPSR County Characteristics File. 21 In particular, for each county, we calculate a measure of population density in 2005, by dividing population in that year by land area, as expressed in square miles. This density measure is in turn expressed in tens of thousands. The only reasonable proxy for the rural-urban location which is directly available in the CCES survey is a question about whether the respondent owns a pickup truck. We use this variable in Section 6 .

Other county-level and state-level features might be correlated with our dependent variable and other explanatory variables. More specifically, in Section 6 , we control for the unemployment rate in 2005 and the crime rate for every 100 inhabitants in 2004, both measured at the county level. Finally, we match the CCES data with information on the estimated fraction of illegal immigrants (over total population) living in each state in year 2005. The estimated number of illegal immigrants by state is calculated by the Pew Hispanic Center, while total population data is taken from the US Census Bureau. We also compute a measure of the fraction of legal immigrants over total population in 2005. The number of legal immigrants by state is computed as the difference between the number of foreign-born individuals and the number of illegal immigrants. The number of foreign-born individuals is derived from the Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey. 22

Summary statistics of these variables are shown in Table  2 , separately for individual-, county-, and state-level variables. The large majority of respondents is against the Senate plan. Regarding the most frequently watched national evening news program, Fox News obtains the highest ratings, with NBC and CNN ranking second and third, respectively. Age, education, and household income are positively skewed, and this is also the case for the conservative ideology score.

At the county level, the population density, unemployment, and crime rate are all positively skewed and show a sizeable degree of cross-sectional variation. Regarding state-level variables, the estimated fraction of illegal immigrants displays some non-negligible variation as well, ranging from a quarter of a percentage point for West Virginia to around 7 percentage points for California. This also applies to the fraction of legal immigrants, which ranges from about a fifth of a percentage point for Mississippi to almost 20 percentage points again for California.

5 Empirical results

In this section, we empirically analyze the individual-level propensity to support the Senate plan on illegal immigration as a function of respondents’ characteristics. We run a set of probit regressions with the pro_lenient_plan dummy as the dependent variable, excluding all individuals who describe themselves as immigrants. The regression output is displayed in Table  3 where, for each explanatory variable, we report the marginal effect. Standard errors are adjusted for clustering at the state level and are shown under each marginal effect.

Notice that, in the CCES question we analyze, individuals are asked to evaluate the Senate plan but are not mentioned any explicit alternative. 23 The interpretation of the marginal effects of a number of variables (in particular, education and income) depends on which alternative voters have in mind—whether the status quo or the House plan—as they evaluate the Senate plan. To shed light on this point, we run the same regressions as in Table  3 using the second question—the pro_lenient_plan2 dummy variable—as the dependent variable (see Table 7 in the Appendix ). We find that the estimates of the marginal effects of most variables in Table 7 in the Appendix are very similar to the corresponding estimates in Table  3 . 24 As a result, we conclude that the alternative respondents have in mind, as they evaluate the Senate plan, is the House plan.

5.1 The impact of media exposure on individual attitudes

In Table  3 , we report our baseline results. We start with a specification where we omit ideological and political party controls (regression [1]). Next, in column [2], we introduce the conservative ideology score and the 3-point party id variable. In regression [3], we replace the 3-point party id variable with a 7-point one and we include the county-specific measure of population density as well as the state-specific measures of exposure to illegal and legal immigration. In columns [4] and [5], we introduce state and designated market area (DMA) fixed effects, respectively. 25 In the first five columns of Table  3 , we use dummy variables for each media channel, with CBS viewers as the omitted category.

In order to analyze the role played by media exposure—in particular in relation to self-selection issues—it is crucial to compare the estimates with and without ideological controls, i.e., column [1] vs. columns [2]–[5]. By themselves, political and ideological variables are very significant predictors of policy attitudes towards illegal immigration. A 1-point increase in the conservative ideology scale (which is defined on a 0–100 range) is associated with about half of a percentage point decrease in the probability of supporting the Senate plan. By the same token, the 3-point party id variable is negatively and significantly correlated with the lenient plan dummy, and the same is true for the 7-point party id, which we introduce from column [3]. When not controlling for self-reported ideology and party identification, individuals watching Fox News are 26 percentage points less likely to support the Senate plan—as compared to CBS viewers (the excluded category)—while this marginal effect shrinks to between 9 and 10 percentage points when we do control for ideological and partisan preferences. Similarly, PBS viewers are 23 percentage points more likely than CBS viewers to support the lenient plan in column [1] and between 14 and 15 percentage points in the following columns. To the extent that conservative individuals have a preference for Fox News and dislike the Senate plan on illegal immigration, omitting controls for ideology and party id biases downwards the marginal effect of the Fox News dummy, which ends up absorbing those self-selection effects. 26 Along the same lines, to the extent that liberal individuals appreciate PBS and the more lenient Senate plan, the marginal effect of the PBS dummy is biased upwards when not controlling for ideology and party id.

On the other hand, those watching CNN are about 5 percentage points less likely to favor the Senate plan when not controlling for ideology and between 8 and 9 percentage points less likely when doing so. Prima facie, it is perhaps surprising that those watching CNN are systematically less likely to support the Senate plan than CBS viewers, but this result can be explained in light of what in Section 1 we have dubbed the “Lou Dobbs effect.” 27 Lou Dobbs, the former anchor and managing editor of CNN evening news, has been very vocal regarding the costs imposed by illegal immigration on the American public and has consistently opposed the Senate bill proposal. This is how he described illegal immigration on his CNN website: “The single most critical issue to protect our nation is the securing of our borders and our ports. Every day, tens of thousands of containers enter our country from other nations and they are never inspected. At the same time, our government turns a blind eye to the thousands of people who illegally cross our borders. These scenarios exist because corporate America has convinced our leaders that this is one of the best ways to remain competitive.” When the Senate passed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act , Lou Dobbs introduced the story with the following words: “Tonight, the Senate has just voted for a so-called comprehensive immigration reform bill. The vote, 62-36. The legislation gives amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and sharply escalates the war on our middle class and raises the cost of federal government substantially.” 28 From the point of view of ideological self-selection, the bias towards 0 of the CNN dummy variable in regression [1]—induced by omitting ideological controls—suggests that CNN viewers are more liberal than CBS viewers (the omitted category). In addition, and most importantly, the result for CNN—that the impact of the news program works in the opposite direction with respect to self-selection—gives us confidence that our correlations are at least in part driven by the causal impact of media exposure. In other words, the coefficient on CNN represents, if anything, a lower bound on the causal impact of CNN on attitudes towards illegal immigrants.

It is also interesting to notice that the marginal effects of media exposure are remarkably stable once we start controlling for ideological and partisan preferences. As mentioned above, beginning with column [3], we replace the 3-point party id variable with the 7-point one, but this does not affect our estimates of the media exposure variables. 29

Focusing on the other media channels, individuals watching NBC, MSNBC, or other networks appear not to be significantly different from CBS viewers in their propensity to support the more lenient immigration plan, while viewers of ABC News are systematically less likely to favor the Senate plan than CBS viewers, with an estimated marginal effect between 3 and 4 percentage points. Finally, respondents declaring not to watch any national evening news program are significantly less likely than CBS viewers to be in favor of the Senate plan.

Overall, the evidence we have gathered is consistent with the fact that self-selection explains a sizeable portion of the correlation between policy attitudes on illegal immigration and media exposure, but not the whole of it: persuasion, as best exemplified by the Lou Dobbs effect, appears to be a non-negligible factor. How do the effects of media exposure relate to the ideological position of each TV channel? In other words, is it true that more conservative channels have a more negative impact on the probability of supporting the lenient Senate plan? If one believes that self-selection is satisfactorily accounted for by controlling for the ideology and party id of the respondent, then the estimated marginal effect of each channel dummy measures the persuasive effect of that channel on attitudes towards illegal immigration. Our goal is to relate this persuasive effect to the ideological position of the TV channel. While measures of the partisan stance of media outlets are available in the literature, we can directly exploit the self-selection argument in order to build our own measure of each TV channel’s ideological position. To do so, we proceed as follows. A given TV channel reveals itself to be less conservative than CBS if it is chosen by people who are less conservative than the (omitted) category of CBS viewers. In turn, this is true if and only if the marginal effect of that channel dummy is more positive when not controlling for the ideology and party id of the respondents than when doing so. More formally, let the marginal effect of a TV channel dummy in regression (1) be δ 1 and the marginal effect of the same TV channel in regression (5) be δ 5 . In turn, δ 1 = δ 5 +OVB where OVB is the omitted variable bias arising from the omission of ideological controls. We know that

where Ideology represents the self-reported (conservative) ideology variable. In other words, the omitted variable bias is proportional to the product of the correlation between our measure of viewers’ ideology and the observed TV channel and of the correlation between our measure of viewer’s ideology and attitudes towards illegal immigration. If δ 1 > δ 5 , it must be true that OVB>0, and therefore, since our estimates suggest that Corr(Ideology,Attitudes)<0, then it must be true that Corr(Ideology,TVChannel)<0, i.e., the TV channel is not watched by viewers with conservative ideology. In other words, the TV channel reveals itself to be less conservative than the CBS benchmark, based on the preferences of viewers who choose it. In particular, the expression above suggests to divide the estimated OVB by the correlation between ideology and immigration attitudes, in order to obtain a normalized measure of the average conservative ideology of each TV channel.

The outcome of this exercise is illustrated in Fig.  1 where—for each TV channel—we plot the estimated marginal effect—on the propensity to support the Senate plan—against its overall ideological position on a liberal-conservative scale. More precisely, the former is taken from column [5] in Table  3 , while the latter is calculated as the difference in the estimated marginal effect of each channel dummy between specification [1] and specification [5], again in Table  3 , divided by the estimated correlation of the conservative ideology score with attitudes. The relationship appears to be negative, since more conservative channels like Fox News are associated with a more negative effect on the propensity to support the Senate plan, and vice versa for a liberal channel like PBS. It is especially interesting to focus on the relative position of CNN, which is close to CBS and NBC from the point of view of the overall ideological position (as revealed by its viewers), but has a negative effect on immigration attitudes, the size of which is comparable to that of Fox News. 30

Estimated ideological position of each TV channel and effect on illegal immigration attitudes. Notes: The graph displays the estimated marginal effect on the propensity to support the Senate plan for each TV channel against its overall ideological position. The former is taken from column [2] in Table  3 . The latter is a measure of conservative ideology and is calculated as the difference in the estimated marginal effect of each channel dummy when moving from specification [1] to specification [2], i.e., when including ideological and party id controls, divided by the estimated correlation between the ideology score and migration attitudes. See Section 5.1 for additional details

The exposure to real-world events is also likely to affect individual attitudes or at least to be a significant predictor thereof. At the county level, population density is positively and significantly correlated with the propensity to support the Senate plan: column [3] in Table  3 shows that an increase of density of 10,000 individuals per square mile is associated with a 3-percentage-point increase in the probability of being in favor of the more lenient immigration plan. This result is consistent with the idea that living in an urban area increases the frequency of encounters with illegal immigrants and hence positively affects the respondent’s views on the issue. Thus, this finding resonates with the so-called intergroup contact theory ( Allport 1954 ). According to this theory, as developed within the field of social psychology, the interaction between different racial groups can reduce prejudice and foster more friendly attitudes. Also, living in an urban area is likely to be correlated with other unobserved features of the respondent’s political views.

In column [3], we also control for the state-specific fraction of illegal immigrants: we find that respondents living in states with a higher fraction of illegal immigrants are significantly more likely to support the more lenient Senate plan. The size of this correlation is quite large, as a 1-percentage-point increase in the fraction of illegals is associated with a 0.7-percentage-point increase in the propensity to support the Senate plan. This result is again consistent with the “intergroup contact theory.” One might be concerned that the partial correlation between attitudes and the state-specific fraction of illegal immigrants is picking up some omitted variable at the state level, e.g., exposure to legal immigrants. Thus, we also control for the state-specific fraction of legal immigrants and find that it is not significantly correlated with the dependent variable. Columns [4]–[5] replicate the specification featured in column [3] but with the addition of state and DMA fixed effects, respectively: the estimated marginal effects are remarkably robust to this change.

In the second part of Table  3 , we further investigate the relationship between immigration attitudes and the respondent’s favorite evening news broadcast. In particular, we check whether the way each news broadcast covers illegal immigration helps explain the previously estimated marginal effects on the TV channel dummies. Both the overall amount and type of media coverage devoted to a certain issue could matter. In our case, we focus on overall coverage, since it can be easily measured in a replicable fashion. The Dow Jones Factiva online archive allows to search the transcripts of evening news programs on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, PBS, and NBC. We proxy the total amount of coverage to which respondents are exposed—before being interviewed during the 2006 midterm campaign—with the broadcast-specific number of stories featuring the words “immigration” or “immigrants” between January 2006 and October 2006. We do the same with the search terms “illegal immigration” or “illegal immigrants,” and we compute the difference between those two counts, in order to obtain a measure of immigration coverage that does not mention illegal immigration. 31

Table 8 in the Appendix reports media coverage data for each of the six TV channels. It is interesting to notice that Fox News and CNN devoted the largest amount of coverage to immigration overall, while PBS and CBS devoted the least. However, when looking at illegal immigration, PBS dedicated much less coverage than CBS, while CNN gave more coverage than Fox.

In the second part of Table  3 , for comparison purposes, we start with a baseline specification (column [6]) which includes only the respondents mentioning the six channels as favorite ones—thus, we exclude respondents who do not watch a national evening news program—but we do not control for media coverage variables. In column [7], we add as regressors the channel-specific count of stories mentioning illegal immigration and the channel-specific count of stories mentioning immigration but not the illegal aspect of it. There is a very strong and negative correlation between those measures of media coverage and the propensity to support the Senate plan. In terms of magnitudes, ten additional illegal immigration stories during the January/October 2006 period are associated with a 1-percentage-point decrease in the probability of supporting the more lenient plan on immigration. The size of the effect for stories mentioning immigration but not the illegal one is the same. All other estimated marginal probabilities are practically unaffected by this cardinal specification of the media exposure variable.

This last result—i.e., the sizeable and significant impact of the number of immigration-related stories on the propensity to support the Senate plan—is interesting because it provides additional evidence that the media effects we are estimating are not driven only by self-selection. As a matter of fact, while it is plausible that individuals self-select into evening news programs based on the broad ideological position of the channel, it is less likely that self-selection works on the basis of the count of stories covering immigration.

Finally, for the specific result on the impact of FOX news, we are able to provide causal evidence based on an instrument used in the literature ( DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007 ). In particular, for each individual surveyed in the CCES data set, we used the information on county of residence and merged the survey data with information on the introduction of Fox News (and CNN) in US cable markets. 32 To allow for a non-linear effect of the introduction of the channel, we used the number of years since it was introduced in the individual’s county of residence and created three variables, each capturing the availability of Fox News (and CNN) in 1998, 2000, and 2003. In particular, each of the variables gives the percentage of the population in each county which could access the network in each of the 3 years. We used these variables as instruments for the respondent’s consumption of Fox News as well as indicators for whether the individuals subscribe to cable or satellite TV, and the results are shown in Table  4 . The first column reports OLS estimates, where we restrict the sample to the states for which the data on US cable markets are available. Columns 2 and 4 present the first stages of specifications where we, respectively, exclude and include the CNN variable, and columns 3 and 5 present the corresponding second-stage specifications. The first stage is strong in both cases, with a F value of the excluded instruments equal to 11.33 (column 2) and 14.07 (column 4). The second-stage results, which are significant at the 5% level, confirm that Fox News consumption negatively impacts the probability that the respondent favors the more lenient (towards illegal migrants) Senate plan.

5.2 Socio-demographic and economic determinants of individual attitudes

Besides studying the role played by the media, the regressions reported in Table  3 allow us to analyze the labor market and welfare state determinants of attitudes in favor of legalization, accounting for a number of socio-demographic individual-level controls.

First, we find that the impact of age on the propensity to support the Senate plan is characterized by a U-shaped relationship, as shown by the negative marginal effect of age and the positive marginal effect of age squared. The estimated minimum in the propensity to support the Senate plan occurs at an age between 55 (column [2]) and 58 (column [1]). In other words, as they approach midlife, young respondents become more opposed to the legalization plan, while older respondents become more in favor as they move towards retirement. A plausible interpretation of the positive marginal effect for elderly individuals is that illegal immigrants—who would be legalized under the Senate plan and deported under the House plan—offer services which are mostly consumed by the old, for example, elderly care and landscaping services.

Moreover, females appear to be significantly more supportive of the Senate plan only when not controlling for ideology (column [1]). In fact, once we control for self-reported ideology and party id in the following regressions, we do not find evidence of a gender effect on pro-legalization attitudes. This result can be easily explained by the fact that women are on average more liberal than men so that—when not controlling for ideology—the ideology effect on illegal immigration attitudes is absorbed by the female dummy. A similar interpretation can be given to the marginal effect of the Black dummy variable, which is positive and significant in column [1] and becomes insignificant in the following regressions.

Not surprisingly, being a Latino has a positive and significant impact on pro-legalization attitudes, controlling or not for ideology and party id. Our estimates also show that individuals are more willing to support the Senate plan the more recent the immigration status of their family (as captured by immigrant origin ). The size of this effect is relatively large: A one-point increase in the immigrant origin variable is associated with an approximately 2-percentage-point increase in the propensity to support the lenient immigration plan.

Respondents are significantly more likely to support the Senate plan, the higher their education level and their household income. Both correlations are strongly significant throughout the table, although the magnitude of the effect is larger for education. 33

The positive impact of education on pro-legalization attitudes is consistent with the labor-market competition hypothesis ( Scheve and Slaughter 2001 ; Kessler 2001 ; Mayda 2006 ; O’Rourke and Sinnott 2006 ). 34 In fact, the Senate plan is likely to increases the labor market competition faced by unskilled natives—relative to the House plan. Since undocumented migrants are mostly unskilled, the effect of legalizing them, as opposed to deporting them, is to increase the relative supply of unskilled workers in the USA.

In Appendix Table 9, we split the sample according to whether the respondent belongs to the labor force or not. 35 We find that the estimate of the marginal effect of education is systematically larger for those who belong to the labor force than for those who do not. This evidence confirms the above labor market interpretation of the marginal effect of education. In addition, the impact of education on legalization attitudes is positive and significant for individuals out of the labor force as well. Thus, our results are also consistent with a noneconomic interpretation of the effect of education, according to which the education variable is to some extent capturing the cultural openness of the respondent (see, for example, Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007 ). Thus, both noneconomic and labor market considerations shape the impact of education on public opinion on the Senate plan.

The impact of household income has been used in the literature to proxy for the perceived effect that immigration has on natives through the welfare state channel ( Hanson et al. 2007 ; Hanson 2005 ; Facchini and Mayda 2009 ). In the presence of a redistributive welfare state, the positive coefficient on individual income suggests that respondents perceive the legalization provision contained in the Senate plan as bringing about an increase in the welfare state burden created by illegal immigrants, which is viewed negatively by both rich and poor natives, but by the poor even more than by the rich (given that the poor are the ones who are more adversely impacted by the reduction of public services). 36

6 Robustness checks

In this section, we perform two sets of robustness checks on our baseline results. First, we carry out a series of falsification exercises on the role played by Lou Dobbs’ CNN on migration attitudes, by looking at questions that tap into other policy preferences. Second, we introduce further controls at the individual and local levels to better deal with ideological self-selection into TV channels and, more generally, with omitted variable bias.

6.1 Placebo tests on the Lou Dobbs effect

We are concerned that individual-level unobservables might drive the negative correlation we find between CNN viewership and the probability of supporting the more lenient Senate plan. To deal with this issue, we exploit the richness of the CCES data, which contains several additional questions tapping into the preferences of individuals on other policy issues. The idea is to assess whether the similarity of CNN and Fox News viewers’ opinions is confined only to immigration policy or whether it is a broader phenomenon.

To this end, we focus on answers to three additional questions and replicate specifications (1) and (2) from Table  3 using them as dependent variables. First, we look at opinions on an increase in the mandatory minimum wage. 37

We create a pro_minimum_wage dummy, which equals 1 if the individual would favor an increase in the minimum wage and 0 otherwise. Second, we consider a question on whether the Iraq war was a mistake. 38 Again, we construct a iraq_mistake dummy which takes a value of 1 if the respondent believes that the war was a mistake and 0 otherwise. Finally, we also look at a question on the desirability of a trade policy measure, i.e., participation of the USA in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) agreement. 39 In particular, we create an anti_CAFTA dummy variable, which takes a value of 1 if the respondent opposes the agreement and 0 otherwise.

The results of the exercise are displayed in Table  5 , which is divided in three parts, one for each of the three questions. The comparison of the estimated coefficients on the TV channel dummies between the two specifications in each subgroup—controlling and not controlling for ideology and party identification—allows us to assess the extent of ideological self-selection. Consider for instance the attitudes of Fox News viewers on the minimum wage and the Iraq war. When not controlling for ideology (columns [1] and [3]), these individuals are, respectively, 44 and 34% less likely to support an increase in the minimum wage and to think that the Iraq war was a mistake, as compared to the excluded category of CBS viewers. Controlling instead for ideology and party id, these effects shrink to, respectively, 21 and 10%. This evidence corresponds to what we have already found for illegal immigration.

On the other side of the political spectrum, we find an opposite pattern for PBS viewers, which again parallels our results regarding immigration attitudes. Finally, when looking at these three issues, CNN viewers appear broadly similar to PBS viewers, as they are (i) more favorable to an increase in the minimum wage, (ii) more likely to consider the Iraq war a mistake, and (iii) more likely to oppose the CAFTA agreement, as compared to the baseline category of CBS viewers (Table  5 , columns [1], [3], and [5]). Moreover, when controlling for self-reported ideology and party id, the estimated marginal effects for CNN viewers similarly shrink in magnitude. 40

In Section 5.1 , we correlated the implied ideological position of each media channel with the estimated effect on migration attitudes. From this point of view, Fig.  1 highlighted the peculiar case of CNN, a comparatively liberal TV channel with a negative effect on the propensity to support the more lenient Senate plan on illegal immigration. In Figs.  2 , 3 and 4 , we replicate the design of Fig.  1 but we focus on these three additional policy questions. More precisely, in Fig.  2 , we plot—for each TV channel—the estimated marginal effect on the propensity to support an increase in the minimum wage against its overall ideological position. The former is taken from column [2] in Table  5 . The latter is a measure of conservative ideology and is calculated as the difference in the estimated marginal effect of each channel dummy between specification [1] and specification [2], divided by the estimated correlation between the ideology score and minimum wage attitudes. We proceed in a similar fashion for the Iraq war (Fig.  3 ) and CAFTA questions (Fig.  4 ).

Estimated ideological position of each TV channel and effect on minimum wage attitudes. Notes: The graphs display—for each TV channel—its overall ideological position against the estimated marginal effect on the propensity to favor an increase in the minimum wage (Fig.  2 ), to think that the Iraq war was a mistake (Fig.  3 ), and to oppose the CAFTA trade agreement. See Section 6.1 for additional details

Estimated ideological position of each TV channel and effect on Iraq war attitudes. Notes: The graphs display—for each TV channel—its overall ideological position against the estimated marginal effect on the propensity to favor an increase in the minimum wage (Fig.  2 ), to think that the Iraq war was a mistake (Fig.  3 ), and to oppose the CAFTA trade agreement. See Section 6.1 for additional details

Estimated ideological position of each TV channel and effect on CAFTA attitudes. Notes: The graphs display—for each TV channel—its overall ideological position against the estimated marginal effect on the propensity to favor an increase in the minimum wage (Fig.  2 ), to think that the Iraq war was a mistake (Fig.  3 ), and to oppose the CAFTA trade agreement. See Section 6.1 for additional details

These three figures show the presence of a strongly negative and significant correlation between the estimated ideological position of each TV channel and its implied effect on viewers’ opinion. Most importantly—and differently from Fig.  1 —CNN does not appear to be an outlier at all, as it looks like a liberal media outlet with liberal effects on attitudes. In other words, we reject the alternative hypothesis that CNN viewers hold less liberal views on illegal immigration simply because they happen to be less liberal across the board.

6.2 Additional controls

The CCES survey contains a host of questions that allow us to further investigate the lifestyle and ideological position of the respondent. Moreover, by matching the CCES data with county-level information, we can better control for the politically relevant features of the local environment where the respondent lives. In Table  6 , we check the robustness for our baseline results to controlling for these potentially confounding factors.

In column [1] of Table  6 , we include the same variables as in column [3] of Table  3 plus a control for whether the respondent owns a pickup truck: as discussed in Section 4 , this variable might simultaneously capture whether the individual does not live in a city and something about his lifestyle. We find that owning a pickup truck is associated with a 5.5-percentage-point reduction in the probability to support the Senate plan.

As discussed by Guiso et al. (2003) , individual attitudes might be systematically correlated with the type and intensity of religious beliefs being held. Regarding the specific topic of immigration, Guiso et al. (2003) show that individuals interviewed within the World Values Survey (WVS) are significantly more intolerant towards immigrants if they were raised religiously and they report to be currently religious, while being actively religious is not significantly correlated with immigration attitudes. Moreover, Guiso et al. (2003) show that Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims are more likely to be intolerant towards immigrants than agnostic individuals, while Buddhists display the opposite tendency.

In columns [2] and [3] of Table  6 , we exploit the CCES questions tapping into the religious beliefs and habits of respondents. More specifically, we include dummy variables for the respondent declaring to be Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, of another religion, or of another Christian religion, keeping as the omitted category those who declare not to have any religious preference. We also control for each individual’s church attendance frequency and for the importance he/she attaches to religion in everyday life. Self-declared Protestants and Catholics are around 6 percentage points less likely to support the Senate plan on illegal immigration, as compared to individuals with no religious preference. The correlation is of the same sign and larger in magnitude (around 8 percentage points) for those who declare to belong to another Christian religion. The level of significance is 1% for all three marginal effects. On the other hand, the propensity to favor the more lenient plan on illegal immigration is significantly and positively correlated with church attendance. 41 Finally, the religion importance dummy is not significantly correlated with the respondent’s opinion on the illegal immigration plan.

From this point of view, our results are reasonably in line with those obtained by Guiso et al.: we similarly find that immigration attitudes are significantly more negative for Catholics and Protestants; however, we find no significant effect for Muslims. This could be due to the lower number of Muslims in the USA, as compared to the cross-country WVS sample. Moreover, differently from Guiso et al., we find that church attendance has a mitigating effect on negative immigration attitudes. Of course, one should handle this comparison with some further caution, since (i) our sample focuses on the USA; (ii) we are concerned with illegal immigration, rather than with the immigration phenomenon as a whole; and (iii) we use as the dependent variable a policy-related question, instead of a direct question about attitudes.

An additional concern regarding our results is the possibility that they are partially driven by omitted variables at the state or county level. In Table  3 , we have already shown that our findings are robust to the inclusion of state and DMA fixed effects as well as to controlling for population density at the county level. In column [3] of Table  6 , we further control for the county-specific 2004 crime rate and 2005 unemployment rate: the rationale for this is that individuals might be particularly sensitive to their economic and social environment when they are asked about a policy proposal regarding a potentially very contentious issue.

We find a positive, statistically significant and quantitatively non-negligible correlation between the county-level crime rate and the propensity to support the Senate plan: an additional crime event for every 100 inhabitants is associated with about a 1-percentage-point increase in the probability of favoring the more lenient plan on immigration. Conditionally on all the caveats regarding the distinction between causation and correlation, this result is consistent with the hypothesis that individuals on average believe that an immigrant’s illegal status is conducive to a higher propensity to criminal behavior and that legalization might help break this vicious link. On the other hand, we find no significant impact of the unemployment rate. It is also worthwhile to notice that, in columns [1] and [2], there is a mildly significant and negative relationship between the propensity to support the Senate plan and the state-specific fraction of legal immigrants. 42 It is still the case that the fraction of illegal immigrants is positively and significantly correlated with the pro_lenient_plan dummy, mildly so in column [3].

In the second part of Table  6 (columns [4], [5], and [6]), we replicate the format of the first part but use the cardinal measure of immigration coverage (as already explored in the second part of Table  3 ). When doing so, we do not find significant departures from the results in Table  3 and—regarding the robustness checks themselves—from those displayed in the first part of Table  6 .

7 Conclusions

In this paper, we have analyzed the determinants of public opinion on illegal immigration and, in particular, the role played by the media in shaping these attitudes. Our main results suggest that both economic and noneconomic drivers are important. We find that respondents are more favorable to the plan on illegal immigration introduced in the US Senate in 2006, the more skilled, more liberal, and richer they are. Furthermore, we find that individuals watching Fox and CNN evening news are substantially more likely to oppose the Senate plan than those who watch CBS. PBS viewers are instead more likely to support it.

Our paper thus provides strongly suggestive and robust evidence that the media do play an important role in shaping individual preferences on an important policy issue like illegal immigration. Still, to the extent that we do not have a clean natural experiment, our findings must be interpreted with caution. As we have repeatedly stressed in the paper, the crucial confounding factor is self-selection: individuals do choose to expose themselves to a media outlet, whose ideological position is close to theirs. Still, our analysis points out that CNN viewers, who according to our findings entertain liberal preferences, share opinions towards the Senate plan that are similar to those of FOX viewers, a much more conservative group, whereas they differ from them on a wide array of other issues. This finding is consistent with what we have named the “Lou Dobbs” effect: the CNN anchorman—who entertains a very negative position about illegal immigration—appears to have been able to influence his viewer’s opinions on the legislation introduced in the US Senate, making them less supportive of a proposal that included a substantial legalization initiative. 43

1 A few papers have focused on questions related to illegal immigration in specific regions. Hood III and Morris (2000 ), Newton (2000) , and Tam and Cain (2001) , for instance, have looked at the determinants of support for proposition 187 in California, which limited the access enjoyed by illegal immigrants to a series of welfare state benefits.

2 http://cces.gov.harvard.edu/data .

3 Lou Dobbs, the anchorman and managing editor of CNN evening news at the time of the survey ( Lou Dobbs Tonight ), has been very vocal about the costs of illegal immigration and a staunch opponent of the Senate plan.

4 The estimates reported above are based on regressions which control for self-reported ideology and party identification.

5 For direct evidence on the effects of legalization on undocumented immigrants’ job perspectives, see Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark (2002 ) and Orrenius and Zavodny (2007) .

6 See Espenshade and Hempstead (1996) and Hainmueller and Hiscox (2007) for an alternative interpretation of the empirical evidence on the impact of skill.

7 Experimental evidence, such as that provided by Iyengar et al. (1982) , lends the strongest support to the presence of a causal link going from the media to the public agenda.

8 See Krosnick and Miller (1996) for a review of this literature. For lab experiments on priming, see Iyengar and Kinder (1987) and Valentino et al. (2002) , with the latter specifically focused on racial attributes. See also Lenz (2009) for a critical evaluation of the concept of priming.

9 Specifically on migration, Brader et al. (2008) investigate—within a survey experiment—how the framing of the issue affects individual attitudes. They find that a Latino frame, when coupled with some emphasis on the costs of immigration, is especially conducive to negative feelings towards immigration through the “anxiety” channel.

10 From this point of view, these contributions build on the empirical literature which aims at measuring the ideological position of media outlets. See, e.g., Groseclose and Milyo (2005) , Puglisi (2011) , Lott Jr and Hassett (2004 ), Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) , Larcinese et al. (2011) , and Puglisi and Snyder Jr (2011 ).

11 Chiang and Knight (2011 ) use interview data to assess the effect of a presidential candidate’s endorsement by a newspaper on its readers’ propensity to vote for that candidate. Exploiting the difference between individuals being interviewed before or after the publication of the endorsement, they show that only surprising endorsements, i.e., those that depart from the expected ideological stance of the newspaper, affect voting behavior.

12 Larcinese et al. (2011 ) have found evidence for this type of behavior looking at the differential coverage of good vs. bad economic news as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent president.

13 In fact, as emphasized by McCombs (2002) and Weaver (2007) , the concepts of priming and framing do overlap.

14 Citrin et al. (1997 ), using the 1992 and 1994 ANES surveys, find instead only limited support for the role played by economic drivers.

15 See Hanson (2006) for more details.

16 For instance, 26% of the workers in landscaping services and 20% of those in meat/poultry packing are unauthorized. According to Passel (2005) , in ten industries, illegal immigrants represent more than 10% of the overall labor force.

17 For additional methodological details, see Ansolabehere and Schaffner (2010) and http://cces.gov.harvard.edu/data .

18 We have analyzed the robustness of our findings when we include the “don’t know” observations in, alternatively, the pro-migration category or in the anti-migration category of the dependent variable. The results are available upon request, and in both cases, the estimates are remarkably similar to those we derive excluding the “don’t know” observations. Most likely, this is due to the relatively small number of “don’t know” observations and suggests that excluding them from the analysis is unlikely to be an issue.

19 The exact wording is as follows: “Which network do you watch most frequently for national evening news?”

20 There is an additional category for those who decline to answer. We exclude them from the analysis, since it is unclear whether they are drawn disproportionately from the highest or the lowest income bracket.

21 ICPSR Study No. 20660: see http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR/STUDY/20660.xml .

22 See http://pewhispanic.org/reports/foreignborn/ .

23 On the other hand, in the second question, individuals are asked about the Senate vs. House plans. We have decided not to use the second question as our main dependent variable since it is asked to a substantially smaller number of respondents.

24 The most important differences are that, in the regressions using the second question, the Black dummy variable is often negative and significant when we control for ideology; in addition, the fraction of illegal immigrants at the state level does not have a significant effect.

25 DMAs identify the different TV cable markets in the USA; they are named after the main city (or cities) in each area. See DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) for more details.

26 This result is in fact consistent with the Groseclose and Milyo (2005) analysis of think tank quotes, which places Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume significantly to the right with respect to CBS Evening News.

27 See also Akdenizli et al. (2008) .

28 The excerpt is taken from Lou Dobbs Tonight, May 25, 2006.

29 This replacement marginally goes in the direction of increasing the point estimates of the marginal effect of the Fox News dummy (i.e., reducing its absolute value) and decreasing the one on the CNN dummy (i.e., increasing its absolute value).

30 In fact, when including CNN, the relationship between the overall ideological position of each TV channel and its persuasive effect on immigration attitudes is negative and not far from statistical significance at the 10% level, while it is significant almost at the 5% level when excluding CNN. One can also notice that the so-called Big Three, i.e., the oldest US networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), are closely clustered in the scatter plot, while PBS, the publicly financed channel, displays the most liberal stance on both dimensions. In Section 6.1 , we carry out a series of placebo experiments to illustrate how these findings are unique to the immigration question.

31 A word of caution regarding Fox News: Since the transcripts for its evening news broadcast are not available, we instead look at those of the O’Reilly Factor.

32 We thank Stefano Della Vigna for kindly sharing these data with us.

33 The only exception is the coefficient on income in column 1, which is not significant. This is likely due to an omitted variable bias since, when we control for ideology in the following specifications, the coefficient becomes strongly significant.

34 In general, the labor market competition hypothesis predicts that the level of individual skill should be positively correlated with pro-immigration preferences in countries where immigrants increase the labor market competition for unskilled natives (for example, when immigrants are unskilled) and negatively correlated in countries where immigrants increase the labor market competition for skilled natives (for example, when immigrants are skilled). See Figure 5 in the online Appendix .

35 Notice that students are excluded from both subsamples.

36 For a somewhat different point of view, see Camarota (2005) .

37 The exact wording of the CCES question is as follows: “As you may know, the federal minimum wage is currently $5.15 an hour. Do you favor or oppose raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over the next two years, or not?”

38 The exact wording of the question is as follows: “Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?”

39 The exact wording of the question is as follows: “This year Congress also debated a new free trade agreement that reduces barriers to trade between the U.S. and countries in Central America. Some politicians argue that the agreement allows America to better compete in the global economy and would create more stable democracies in Central America. Other politicians argue that it helps businesses to move jobs abroad where labor is cheaper and does not protect American producers [...] What do you think? If you were faced with this decision, would you vote for or against the trade agreement?”

40 Interestingly, on these three issues, MSNBC viewers appear to be similar to the PBS ones, both in the size of the estimated coefficients and in the changes taking place when controlling for ideology.

41 When distinguishing according to the religious faith of the respondent, further results—available upon request—show that the church attendance variable is statistically significant only for Protestants, Catholics, and individuals belonging to another Christian obedience.

42 The relationship is no longer significant in column [3].

43 The departure of Lou Dobbs from CNN in November 2009 can be interpreted as an ex post confirmation of his “heretic” position within the network. In fact, it came after a mounting wave of criticisms regarding his overall stance on the immigration issue and the extended coverage he devoted to the so-called birther conspiracy theory, i.e., Barack Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy to run as presidential candidate.

Labor market effect. Notes: the graph shows the relationships between the respondent’s education and the sensitivity of his/her net income to migration according to the labor market channel, as a function of wether immigration is relatively skilled or unskilled. \(\frac {\hat {I}^{n}_{j}}{d\pi }\) represents the percentage change in individual income for a maginal change in π , the ratio of immigrants to natives

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Acknowledgements

Very useful comments were provided by Jens Hainmueller, Michael Hiscox, Jim Snyder, Cecilia Testa, and seminar audiences at the TOM (Transnationality of Migrants) meeting in Bruxelles, the TOM conference in Louvain-la-Neuve, the TOM conference in Venice, the INSIDE Immigration Workshop in Barcelona, the “Dynamics of Public Opinion on Immigration in Liberal Democracies” conference at the University of Texas at Austin, the 2009 MPSA meeting in Chicago, and the 2009 APSA meeting in Toronto. Anna Maria Mayda and Riccardo Puglisi thank the European Community for financial support received through Marie Curie Fellowships within the TOM project. This paper is produced as part of the CEPR project “Politics, Economics and Global Governance: The European Dimensions” funded by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Programme for Research (Collaborative Project), Contract no. 217559. We would like to thank the anonymous referee and the editor for the helpful comments.

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Expert Commentary

Building border walls and barriers: What the research says

Are border walls effective at deterring migrants? Do they harm wildlife? How are indigenous groups in the area impacted? We explain the research.

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by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource February 15, 2020

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/border-walls-barriers-migrant-research/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, the Journalist’s Resource team is combing through the Democratic presidential candidates’ platforms and reporting what the research says about their policy proposals. We want to encourage deep coverage of these proposals — and do our part to help deter horse race journalism, which research suggests can lead to inaccurate reporting and an uninformed electorate. We’re focusing on proposals that have a reasonable chance of becoming policy, and for us that means several top-polling candidates say they intend to tackle the issue. Here, we look at research on building border walls.

Candidates who oppose expanding the U.S.-Mexico border barrier

Bernie Sanders , Tom Steyer *, Elizabeth Warren *

Candidates who would expand the barrier if experts recommend it

Pete Buttigieg ,* Tulsi Gabbard

Candidates whose position is unclear

Joe Biden , Michael Bloomberg *, Amy Klobuchar *

What the research says

Border barriers can discourage unauthorized border crossings, but the research is mixed in terms of how much they deter migrants from entering the U.S. without permission. Border walls and fences also can damage local habitats and impede the migration of wildlife. A number of academic articles document how the barriers that line the U.S.-Mexico border infringe on the religious and property rights of indigenous nations living in the region.

Meanwhile, hundreds of migrants die or are injured each year trying to go over and around barriers that block off much of America’s nearly 2,000-mile southwestern border. Such structures do not stop foreign visitors from arriving by air and sea and establishing residence without authorization.

Key context

Throughout time, cities, kingdoms and nation-states have built physical barriers to mark their territory, protect their inhabitants and control who and what enters and exits. In just the past few decades, countries worldwide — including the U.S. — have erected thousands of miles of border walls and fences, largely to prevent unauthorized migration. Barriers, writes researcher Elisabeth Vallet , are becoming “a norm of International relations, and a solution in the quest for security.”

“It seems like every month brings news of another border wall going up,” she wrote in The Conversation in 2017 . As of 2019, there were about 70 border barriers in existence across the globe, up from about 15 in 1990, according to Vallet, author of Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity and director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

When the migrant crisis in Europe emerged several years ago, countries there began erecting barriers. Since 2015, “at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia and others — a swift and concrete reaction as more than 1.8 million people descended on Europe from war zones from Afghanistan to Syria,” USA Today reported in mid-2018 .

The U.S. first built a barrier along its southwestern border between 1909 and 1911 — a barbed wire structure in southern California to keep cattle from moving between the U.S. and Mexico, Smithsonian Magazine has reported. The federal government has expanded and reinforced the barrier over time. The Wall Street Journal describes construction efforts in recent decades:

“About 119 miles of barriers were in place before 2005, according to the Government Accountability Office. Work ramped up significantly during the George W. Bush administration, particularly around El Paso, Texas. Over the next 10 years, stretching into the Obama administration, the barriers were extended to cover 654 miles in areas including Tucson, Ariz., the Rio Grande Valley and the San Diego vicinity.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spent $2.3 billion on fencing at U.S.-Mexico border from fiscal years 2007 through 2015, notes a 2018 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s watchdog agency. Of the 654 miles of barrier that line the U.S. border with Mexico, 300 are vehicle barriers and the rest are designed to keep pedestrians out. The border stretches 1,954 miles and runs through four states — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

While most immigrants living in the U.S. are here legally, nearly one-quarter — 10.5 million — do not have permission to be in the country, according to a 2019 report from Pew Research Center.

Donald Trump made unauthorized immigration a signature issue of his 2016 campaign. The president vowed to build at least 500 miles of new barrier by early 2021 for what will be one of the largest federal infrastructure projects in American history, The Washington Post reported earlier this month.

Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, he signed three executive orders aimed at ramping up federal efforts to control the U.S.-Mexico border and clamp down on unauthorized immigration. The first calls for an improved border barrier. It directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border, using appropriate materials and technology to most effectively achieve complete operational control of the southern border.”

About 110 miles of the new barrier have been finished, and federal officials say a total of 450 miles will be completed or under construction by late 2020, The Washington Post explains. The federal government expects to earmark $18.4 billion for the project — enough to put up nearly 900 miles of new barrier before 2022.

Most of the new wall will replace older and smaller barriers. As the Post describes it , the wall is “far more formidable than anything previously in place along the border. The new structure has steel bollards, anchored in concrete, that reach 18 to 30 feet in height and will have lighting, cameras, sensors and improved roads to allow U.S. agents to respond quickly along an expanded ‘enforcement zone.’”

Over the years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has cited reductions in border apprehensions as evidence of the barrier’s effectiveness. It offers this example: When it installed fencing near Yuma, Arizona, the number of people caught crossing the border without permission plunged 90%.

In late 2017, Elaine Duke, then the acting secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wrote an editorial in USA Today explaining that border apprehensions in Yuma in fiscal year 2016 were about 10% of what they had been in fiscal year 2005. Yuma, she wrote, had been one of the first sectors along the southwestern border to receive “infrastructure investments” under the federal Secure Fence Act of 2006 , which authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of additional border fencing as well as additional checkpoints, vehicle barriers and lighting.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report in 2011 , however, suggesting federal officials were unsure why apprehensions along the entire U.S.-Mexico border fell 61% between 2005 and 2010. It “may be due to a number of factors including changes in U.S. economic conditions and border enforcement efforts,” the report states.

A recent report from the U.S. Border Patrol shows that the number of people apprehended in all nine sectors of the southwestern border rose from a combined 327,577 in fiscal year 2011 to 479,371 in fiscal year 2014. While apprehensions dropped to 303,916 in fiscal year 2017, they more than doubled by the end of the 2019 fiscal year to 851,508.

Recent research

Published research on the effectiveness of border barriers is limited and offers conflicting results in terms of how much of a role barriers play in deterring unauthorized entry in the U.S.

“While advanced as a popular solution, the evidence is mixed on whether walls are effective at preventing large movements of people across borders,” Reece Jones , a political geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an international expert on border barriers, writes in a 2016 analysis for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute .

Jones notes that border crossings in the U.S. plummeted in the 1990s, after fences were built along the southwestern border and backed up with large deployments of Border Patrol agents. He also points out that the barriers did not prevent all unauthorized crossings, but rather shifted the stream of migrants to other parts of the border.

“As high-traffic urban routes were closed, migrants and smugglers began to cross in the remote and dangerous deserts of western Arizona,” Jones writes. “Child migration from Central America to the United States, which surged in 2014, has also been undeterred by enforcement.”

Border barriers “are not particularly effective at stopping migration on their own,” he explains in the Journal of Latin American Geography in 2018. “They require constant surveillance by agents, high tech sensors, aircraft, and drones or else they can easily be climbed with a ladder.”

A 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, criticizes the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for failing to develop metrics to assess the effectiveness of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier. The report notes that Customs and Border Protection spent about $2.3 billion from fiscal year 2007 through 2015 on fencing there and that, in 2009, the agency estimated fencing maintenance would cost more than $1 billion over the next 20 years.

“Despite these investments, CBP cannot measure the contribution of fencing to border security operations along the southwest border because it has not developed metrics for this assessment,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office writes in the 75-page report.

The federal watchdog agency points out that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection “could potentially use these data to determine the extent to which border fencing diverts illegal entrants into more rural and remote environments, and border fencing’s impact, if any, on apprehension rates over time. Developing metrics to assess the contributions of fencing to border security operations could better position CBP to make resource allocation decisions with the best information available to inform competing mission priorities and investments.”

The report states that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had begun making changes according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s recommendations.

A paper forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , however, indicates the border barrier has discouraged unauthorized entry. In the paper, Benjamin Feigenberg of the University of Illinois at Chicago looks at how Mexico-to-U.S. migration changed as a result of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which prompted the federal government to add 548 miles of fencing between 2007 and 2010.

Feigenberg estimates the additional fencing resulted in a 39% decline in migration among Mexicans who live close to the border. The reduction is a bit smaller — 38% — among Mexicans who live farther away from the border, in areas of Mexico that, historically, have had little access to smugglers.

Feigenberg concludes that, overall, 41,500 Mexican migrants are deterred by the barrier each quarter, and he estimates the cost of each deterred migrant to be about $4,820.

A 2018 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, updated twice in 2019, also finds that border barriers curbed migration from Mexico to the U.S., but slightly. Researchers from Dartmouth College and Stanford University found the Secure Fence Act reduced the number of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. from 2005 and 2015 by an estimated 46,459 people. That accounts for about 5% of the actual decline in migration during that period.

The paper also finds that even if the U.S. had built a barrier along the entire length of border, that would have had a relatively small impact as well. It would have reduced migration by an estimated 129,438 people, which, the researchers note, “still comprises a small portion (13%) of the observed decline in migration flows between 2005 and 2015.”

Impacts on migrant safety, indigenous rights and the environment

While scholars will continue to study border barriers’ impact on illegal entry, they have established that numerous migrants have died or been injured trying to go over or around them and that the barriers used to separate countries harm natural habitats and local wildlife.

A 2019 study published in Neurosurgery looks at injuries from jumping or falling off a section of the border wall in Arizona. From January 2012 through December 2017, 64 people sought help at Banner University of Arizona Medical Center-Tucson, a hospital adjacent to the border, for treatment of head and spine injuries.

Doctors diagnosed 78% of these individuals with a spine injury and 23% with head trauma, including skull fractures, intracranial hemorrhaging and traumatic brain injury, according to the paper. The authors estimate the cost of patients’ care at Banner totaled $6.3 million, and that public money was the primary source of funds used to pay those bills.

Hundreds of migrants die each year along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in southern Arizona and Texas. Multiple studies over the years have found a direct link between increased border security and migrant deaths. As the U.S. ramped up its border control efforts, more migrants sought entry through remote areas in an attempt to avoid detection, a research team led by Daniel E. Martínez of the University of Arizona writes in a 2014 paper in the Journal on Migration and Human Security .

“Previous research has illustrated that segmented border militarization has resulted in the ‘funnel effect,’ or the redistribution of migratory flows away from traditional urban crossing points into remote and dangerous areas such as the deserts of southern Arizona,” Martínez and his colleagues write. “The Sonoran Desert, which spans much of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, is an ecologically diverse region characterized by rugged terrain, pronounced elevation changes, and relatively little rainfall. Temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months and drop below freezing in the winter and, at higher elevations, in the spring and fall as well.”

Researchers explain in a 2014 paper in the Journal on Migration and Human Security that more aggressive border enforcement has prompted migrants “to travel for longer periods of time through remote areas in an attempt to avoid detection by US authorities, thus increasing the probability of death.”

The U.S. Border Patrol reported 300 deaths at the southwestern border in fiscal year 2019, up slightly from 283 in fiscal year 2018 but considerably lower than the decade high of 471 deaths in fiscal year 2012.

Researchers warn, though, that government tallies might not be accurate.

David K. Androff and Kyoko Y. Tavassoli of Arizona State University write in the journal Social Work that it’s difficult to know how many migrants have died in the desert after crossing into the U.S. without permission. “Medical examiners can only investigate deaths where remains are recovered; as most of the Sonoran desert is an uninhabited, remote wilderness, the discovery of remains is dependent on their identification by U.S. Border Patrol agents or others, and researchers agree that not all remains are recovered,” they write.

Androff and Tavassoli also note in their paper, published in 2012, that “government figures tend to minimize estimates, whereas advocacy groups use higher estimates to draw attention to an issue.”

While much of the focus nationally has been on whether and how to curb illegal entry at the southwestern border, tens of thousands of foreign visitors arrive by air or water each year and do not leave. A significant number of those who stay required visas to get into the U.S. and then let them expire.

Almost 667,000 foreign visitors who were supposed to leave in fiscal year 2018 did not, including 36,289 from Brazil, 29,723 from Nigeria and 35,931 from Venezuela, according to the most recent Entry/Exit Overstay Report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country did not trek through the desert or wade across the Rio Grande to enter the country; they flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport — and stayed,” Miriam Jordan, a national immigration correspondent for The New York Times , wrote last year .

In fiscal year 2019, about 4% of international students and exchange visitors from countries outside North America — a combined 68,593 people — stayed in the U.S. after their expected departure date, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security report shows.

More than 40% of international students and exchange visitors who arrived by air or sea from Yemen, Chad, Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo did not leave when their visas expired in fiscal year 2019. The largest group of students and exchange visitors who overstayed their visas — totaling 12,924 people — came from China, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security report shows.

In April 2019, Trump signed a Presidential memorandum directing federal officials to find ways to address the “rampant” number of visa overstays.

The total number of suspected visa overstays rose from 482,781 in fiscal year 2015 to 739,478 in fiscal year 2016, according to a recent policy paper from Blas Nuñez-Neto , a former senior advisor to the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who now is a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp.

A chart in Nuñez-Neto’s paper shows that visa overstays far outpaced border apprehensions between fiscal years 2015 and 2018. However, he writes in the September 2019 paper that “given the ongoing surge in unauthorized migration this year, which has resulted in more than 766,000 apprehensions in FY2019 through July 31, 2019, it appears likely that individuals apprehended along across our southern border will outstrip visa overstays in 2019.”

While U.S. border walls and fences have failed to block all migrants, legal and academic scholars have documented the various ways the structures interfere with the daily lives and rights of indigenous people living in the area.

A 2017 analysis in the American Indian Law Journal , for example, looks at the barrier’s impact on the civil and property rights of the Tohono O’odham Nation and Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona, the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas and other federally recognized tribes. The barriers have kept tribal members from accessing the southern parts of their land. They also impede the sharing of customs and have led to the desecration of burial sites, the author writes.

“Some United States Natives who have forgotten some of their customs depend on the elders on the Mexican side of the border to come teach youth culture,” the author writes. “Some Natives need to gather plants and other materials important to their spiritual practices in the deserts of Mexico, and are either unable to travel into Mexico or unable to return with those items, as overzealous border guards mistake them for forbidden plants.”

According to anthropologist Christina Leza of Colorado College, tens of thousands of U.S. tribal members live in the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Baja California and Sonora. She wrote in The Conversation last year that her research indicates these individuals routinely cross the U.S.-Mexico border for cultural, ceremonial or social purposes. They are treated as visitors to the U.S., required to pass through security checkpoints, where they can be interrogated, rejected or delayed.

A 2019 article in the American Indian Law Journal examines the U.S. laws that give the federal government vast authority to acquire and use land for immigration security purposes. The paper focuses on how the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and more recent federal actions have affected the Tohono O’odham. The tribe’s 2.8 million-acre reservation includes 62 miles of border between Arizona and Mexico.

“The Tohono O’odham’s mobile way of life and tribal sovereignty has progressively been infringed upon by immigration policies that have continued to tighten border security,” writes Keegan C. Tasker, from the Seattle University School of Law.

She later adds: “The imposition of these sections of the border wall through Tohono O’odham lands would cause irreparable harm to the Nation in several ways, including: (a) implications on the tribe’s sacred lands and environmental resources; (b) implications to the tribe on free movement and tribal sovereignty; and (c) stripping the tribe of sacred natural resources for spiritual and cultural practice.”

Other research finds that border construction has harmed plant and animal life in the U.S. and across the globe.

The Trump administration’s plan to build a continuous wall between the U.S. and Mexico threatens some of North America’s most biologically diverse areas, researchers write in BioScience . In the 2018 article , which includes a call to action, the authors explain that the barrier splits the geographic ranges of more than 1,000 terrestrial and freshwater animal species and 429 plant species, including 62 species the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable.

“Physical barriers prevent or discourage animals from accessing food, water, mates, and other critical resources by disrupting annual or seasonal migration and dispersal routes,” they write.

A 2016 analysis in the Review of European Comparative & International Environmental Law examines the issue from an international law and policy perspective. The authors explain that different types of border barrier affect wildlife differently. Across the globe, barriers are made of a range of materials, including concrete, sand, barbed or razor wire and electrified fencing. In some cases, metal walls extend underground. Some fencing strategies involve land mines.

Barriers are of particular concern in Central Asia, home to a variety of migratory and nomadic mammals, the authors write:

“By splitting populations, impeding migrations and killing animals attempting to cross, border fences pose an actual or potential threat to many of these, including the Mongolian gazelle (Procapra gutturosa), saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus, also known as khulan), Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus), argali sheep (Ovis ammon) and snow leopard (Panthera uncia).”

These barriers “have the potential to undo decades of conservation and international collaboration efforts, and their proliferation entails a need to realign our conservation paradigms with the political reality on the ground,” write the authors, from the Tilburg Law School’s Department of European and International Public Law in the Netherlands.

Another 2016 paper , this one published in PLOS Biology , finds that border barriers in Eastern Europe and Central Asia present a major threat to wildlife. A team of researchers estimates there is a total of 30,000 kilometers of border fencing in the study area and that Central Asia is one of the most heavily fenced regions on the planet.

The researchers express concern for rare or endangered species, including three mammals in Europe — the brown bear, gray wolf and Eurasian lynx. “Large spatial requirements and low population densities make conservation of these species particularly challenging, and the current successes in their conservation rely largely on the ability of individuals to move between subpopulations,” write the authors, who represent several universities and research organizations, including the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Austria and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences .

Further reading

From a Distance: Geographic Proximity, Partisanship, and Public Attitudes toward the U.S.–Mexico Border Wall Jeronimo Cortina. Political Research Quarterly , forthcoming.

The gist: “Although the American public is often aligned with partisan predispositions, often ignored is the role that geographic distance to the border plays in forming attitudes. … Using geocoded survey data from 2017, this paper shows that as the distance to the U.S.-Mexico border increases, Republicans are more likely to support building a wall along the entire border with Mexico due to a lack of direct contact, supplanting direct information with partisan beliefs.”

Barriers Along the U.S. Borders: Key Authorities and Requirements Michael John Garcia. Report from the Congressional Research Center, March 2017.

The gist: This 44-page report, issued by Congress’ public policy research arm, offers a close examination of the federal laws and policies that govern how barriers can or should be used along America’s international borders. The report outlines the various laws that can be waived to proceed with the construction of border walls and fencing, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, Archeological Resources Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Expert sources

Treb Allen , associate professor of economics, Dartmouth College.

Peter Andreas , John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University.

David Androff , associate professor in the School of Social Work, Arizona State University.

Benjamin Feigenberg , assistant professor of economics, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reece Jones , professor and chairman of the Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kenneth Madsen , associate professor of geography, Ohio State University.

Daniel E. Martínez , assistant professor of sociology, University of Arizona.

Melanie Morten , assistant professor of economics, Stanford University.

William Ripple , Distinguished Professor of Ecology, Oregon State University.

Arie Trouwborst , associate professor of environmental law, Tilburg Law School.

Elisabeth Vallet , associate professor in the department of geography, director of the Geopolitics Observatory, University of Quebec in Montreal.

*Dropped out of race since publication date.

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  • v.8(4); 2022 Oct

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The Migrant Crisis and Access to Health Care

“It is a great satisfaction to do something for ourselves, but it is a privilege, an honor and a much greater satisfaction to do something meaningful for someone else in need”

Most people in the world have had to leave the place where they were born or grew up. Some people move as far as the next town or city. Other people will need to leave for more pressing reasons– sometimes for a short time, but sometimes permanently.

More often than what we know, millions of people make one of the most difficult decisions in their lives: to leave their homes and loved ones looking for a better life, to seek a new job, higher wages or seek better education. Unfortunately, many people are forced to flee their country to escape prosecution or human rights violations such as torture. Other people are forced to leave their hometowns because they no longer feel safe, for being targeted because of who they are, personal choices, or different beliefs (ethnicity, religion, sexuality and/or political opinions, etc.).

However, these journeys in hope for a better life are not always safe, and can be full of traumatizing experiences, danger and fear. Some people risk falling prey to some form of exploitation, such as human and drug trafficking.

In the event they legally settle in their new community, many migrants face challenges of being accepted by new host communities, disrupting communal integration, and harmonious living. They face barriers based upon their cultural practices, religious beliefs, language, discrimination and racism.

As a result of their migration, people lose their support networks. Like an invisible “force field,” support networks are the people who surround and share your life—that you can turn to for encouragement, support and personal growth. Having a good support network is a vital tool in maintaining wellbeing—and most times something that we are so used to that we take them for granted. Losing this network can lead to people ending up feeling alone and isolated, or victims of depression, anxiety and substance abuse.

Are All Immigrants the Same?

The terms migrant , refugee , and asylum seeker are often used interchangeably, but it is important to distinguish between them as there is a legal difference.

Migrants can return home if they wish, unlike refugees or asylum seekers who cannot safely return home. This distinction is important for governments, since countries handle migrants under their own immigration laws and processes.

The main difference is choice. Simply speaking, a migrant is someone who chooses to move, and a refugee or an asylum seeker is someone who has been forced from their home.

However, there is no internationally accepted legal definition of a migrant. Most agencies and organizations define migrants as people staying outside their country of origin, who are not asylum-seekers or refugees.

Some migrants leave their country because they want to work, seek better wages, study or join family, for example. Others feel they must leave because of poverty, natural disasters, political unrest, gang violence or other serious circumstances that exist in their home country.

Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict, or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country. The risks to their safety and life were so great that they felt they had no choice but to leave and seek safety outside their country because their own government cannot or will not protect them from those dangers. Refugees have a right to international protection.

An asylum-seeker is a person who has fled their home in search of safety and protection in another country. Because he or she cannot obtain protection in their home country, they seek it elsewhere. Asylum seekers have left their country and are seeking protection from persecution and serious human rights violations. They have not yet been legally recognized as a refugee and are waiting to receive a decision on their asylum claim. Seeking asylum is a human right. Therefore, anyone is allowed to enter another country to seek asylum.

Many of those crossing the U.S. border from Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—are in fact asylum seekers, not migrants. They have a well-founded fear of persecution if they were to return home.

It is important to understand that just because migrants do not flee persecution, they are still entitled to have all their human rights protected and respected, regardless of the status they have in the country they moved to. Governments must protect all migrants from racist and xenophobic violence, exploitation and forced labor. Migrants cannot be detained or forced to return to their countries without a legitimate reason.

Refugees and asylum seekers are employment eligible and are authorized to work indefinitely because their immigration status does not expire.

The other important category refers to undocumented immigrants , who are foreign-born individuals residing in the U.S. without authorization. This group includes individuals who entered the country without authorization and individuals who entered the country lawfully and stayed after their visa or status expired.

The United States government processes migrants through the United States’ Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. 1 Founded on May 28, 1924, the United States Border Patrol is a federal law enforcement agency under the United States' Customs and Border Protection and is responsible for securing the borders of the United States.

In the last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged more than 2.3 million illegal border crossings. This has led to not only a humanitarian crisis, but also a dire security breakdown. We have our border patrol agents spending most of their time processing and helping immigrants settle instead of patrolling the border. This creates a gateway for dangerous drugs and criminals to enter our country: in the past year, CBP has seized more than 645,000 pounds of illegal drugs, including nearly 13,600 pounds of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl. 1

Access to Health Care Is Not a Privilege But a Human Right

Like any US citizen, migrants will require access to health care. The countries most current migrants come from, along with the living circumstances they were facing in their home country, puts them at a higher risk of a suboptimal health status. Chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and malnutrition are prevalent among migrants. In addition, their current situation puts them at higher risk of mental health illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federally funded public health insurance programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

To care for the lower income residents, including undocumented immigrants, the U.S. relies on a patchwork system of safety-net providers, including public and not-for-profit hospitals, federally qualified community health centers (FQHCs), and migrant health centers.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (“PRWORA”) states that only “qualified aliens” are allowed access to federal and state public benefits, including Medicaid. A qualified alien is one who falls into one of the following categories 2 :

  • Lawful permanent resident (LPR or green card holder);
  • Cuban/Haitian entrant;
  • Paroled into the U.S. for at least one year;
  • Conditional entrant granted before 1980;
  • Granted withholding of deportation;
  • Battered noncitizen, spouse, child, or parent;
  • Victims of trafficking and his/her spouse, child, sibling, or parent or individuals with pending application for a victim of trafficking visa;
  • Member of a federally recognized Indian tribe or American Indian born in Canada; and
  • Citizens of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau who are living in one of the U.S. states or territories (referred to as Compact of Free Association or COFA migrants).

Effective December 27, 2020, COFA migrants are considered “qualified noncitizens” and are eligible for Medicaid, if they meet all of the eligibility criteria for their state.

Other lawfully Present Immigrants:

  • Granted Withholding of Deportation or Withholding of Removal, under the immigration laws or under the Convention against Torture (CAT);
  • Individual with Non-Immigrant Status, includes worker visas, student visas, U-visa, and other visas, and citizens of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau;
  • Temporary Protected Status (TPS);
  • Deferred Enforced Departure (DED);
  • Deferred Action Status, except for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) who are not eligible for health insurance options;
  • Lawful Temporary Resident;
  • Administrative order staying removal issued by the Department of Homeland Security;
  • Resident of American Samoa;
  • Applicants for certain statuses; and
  • People with certain statuses who have employment authorization.

Undocumented immigrants are considered “non-qualified aliens,” and therefore can only receive limited federal and state public benefits. Undocumented immigrants may be eligible for “Emergency Medicaid” benefits for services needed for the treatment of an emergency medical condition (excluding organ transplants). They still need to meet all other general Medicaid requirements except those related to immigration status.

An emergency medical condition is defined at §1903(v)(3) of the Social Security Act (“SSA”) 3 as a medical condition (including emergency labor and delivery) manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain) such that the absence of immediate medical attention could reasonably be expected to result in:

  • placing the patient's health in serious jeopardy,
  • serious impairment to bodily functions, or
  • serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part.

Although the PRWORA severely limits what public benefits a state can provide to non-qualified aliens, it allows states to provide additional state funded benefits if state laws enacted after August 22, 1996 affirmatively provide for such eligibility.

There is also a federal rule requiring that the condition must have had a “sudden onset,” however, the Medicaid Act does not contain this language. There is no definitive rule on when an emergency condition ends for the purposes of cutting off emergency Medicaid. In addition, what defines “acute” or “sudden onset” can be misleading as well. A person can have a chronic condition, but in the absence of treatment can result in either placing the patient’s health in serious jeopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of a bodily organ or part.

In addition, in 1986 the Congress enacted the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) (Pub. L. 99-272). 4 This law prevents hospitals that participate in the Medicare program from denying care to unstable patients that could not afford to pay for their care. It requires hospitals covered by the law to provide patients with an emergency medical condition with “an appropriate medical screening examination within the capability of the hospital’s emergency department, including ancillary services routinely available to the emergency department, to determine whether or not an emergency medical condition (EMC) exists.”

In Delaware, neither legally residing noncitizens nor illegally/undocumented residing immigrants are eligible for full Medicaid coverage, but remain eligible for emergency services and labor and delivery only. 5

To be eligible for Emergency Medicaid, the individual must meet all eligibility requirements for a specific Medicaid eligibility group. The individual does NOT have to meet the requirement concerning a declaration of satisfactory immigration status and verification of that status. 6

Delaware Medical Assistance Program (DMAP) defines an emergency as:

  • a sudden serious medical situation that is life threatening; OR
  • a severe acute illness or accidental injury that demands immediate medical attention or surgical attention; AND
  • without the treatment a person’s life could be threatened or the person could suffer serious long-lasting disability. 7

Medically necessary physician (surgeon, pathologist, anesthesiologist, emergency room physician, internist, etc.) or midwife services rendered during an emergency service that meets the above criteria are covered. Ancillary services (laboratory, x-rays, pharmacy, etc.) rendered during an emergency service that meets the above criteria are also covered. Emergency ambulance services to transport these individuals to and from the services defined above are also covered.

The following services are not covered: 8

  • Any service delivered in a setting other than an acute care hospital emergency room or an acute care inpatient hospital. The only exception is that labor and delivery services may be rendered in a birthing center.
  • Any service (such as pharmacy, transportation, office visit, lab or x-ray, home health) that precedes or is subsequent to a covered emergency service. The only exception is that ambulance transportation that is directly related to the emergency is covered
  • Organ transplants
  • Long term care or rehabilitation
  • Routine prenatal and post-partum care

Unfortunately, many lawfully present immigrants who are eligible for coverage remain uninsured because immigrant families face a range of enrollment barriers, including fear, confusion about eligibility policies, difficulty navigating the enrollment process, and language and literacy challenges.

In addition to their own health risks, migrants are at risk of:

  • Health disparities: this can lead to suboptimal care and poorer health outcomes, when compared to the medical care other groups in the same community receive.
  • Inequities: refers to differences which are unnecessary, avoidable and are considered unfair and unjust. Health equity is the absence of systematic disparities in health between groups with different levels of underlying social advantage/disadvantage, related to economic status, positions of power or prestige.
  • Different Social Determinants of Health (SDOH): refer to environmental conditions where people live, study, work, worship that affect a wide range of health conditions, care for the conditions and outcomes.

How is Health Equity Achieved?

According to the CDC, Health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to “attain his or her full health potential” and no one is “disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.” 9

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to increased health, social and financial needs and declines in health coverage among the immigrant population. Immigrants’ work (such as crowded spaces), living (such as sharing housing), and transportation situations put them at increased risk for potential exposure to coronavirus. Noncitizen immigrants also faced risk of financial difficulties due to the pandemic, as many work in service industries, such as restaurants, poultry farms and food services, that suffered cutbacks during the early phases of the pandemic. At the same time, immigrants have had more limited access to COVID-19 financial relief. Immigration-related fears may have contributed to reluctance accessing COVID-19 vaccines.

How is The Government Addressing This Problem?

Recent federal and state activity has focused on expanding access to health care for immigrants. At the federal level, legislation has been proposed that would expand eligibility for health coverage for immigrants.

Some states take up federal options to expand Medicaid and CHIP coverage for lawfully present immigrant children and pregnant women. In addition, several states have recently proposed or taken action to expand state-funded coverage to low-income people regardless of immigration status.

The Biden-Harris Administration has proposed new public rules in an attempt to help reduce fears among immigrants and encourage them to participate in non-cash assistance programs, including health coverage. Funding for Navigator programs has been increased, which provides enrollment assistance to individuals. However, even with these actions, it will likely take time and sustained efforts to rebuild trust and reduce fears about the use of services among immigrant families.

The Administration has also increased funding for outreach and enrollment assistance, which may help eligible immigrant families enroll and stay enrolled in coverage, including awarding CMS $80 million in funding for 60 Navigator programs in 30 states with Federally-Facilitated Marketplaces for the 2022 plan year.

Navigator programs must provide information that is culturally and linguistically appropriate, and can assist individuals with renewing Medicaid coverage and help those who are no longer eligible for Medicaid transition to coverage through the marketplaces. This assistance may be particularly important for helping immigrant families enroll in and maintain coverage given the complex eligibility requirements for immigrants and potential linguistic barriers and fears of negative immigration consequences.

In 2021, the Health Equity and Access Under the Law (HEAL) Act 10 and Lifting Immigrant Families Through Benefits Access Restoration Act (LIFT the BAR) Act 11 were introduced into Congress. The intention is to remove the five-year waiting period for health coverage and other assistance programs that currently apply to many lawfully present immigrants under the 1996 PRORWA rules. These acts would expand the definition of lawfully present immigrants to include Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and certain other immigrants who are authorized to be in the U.S., so that they could qualify for federally funded health care programs. In addition, the HEAL Act would allow undocumented immigrants to access health insurance coverage through the ACA Marketplaces and to be eligible for subsidies to offset the cost of this coverage. Both acts also would ensure that lawfully present immigrants with incomes below 100% Federal Poverty Level (FPL) may receive subsidies if they are ineligible for Medicaid based on immigration status if they live in a state that has not expanded Medicaid.

Several states have proposed or taken action to expand coverage for immigrant children and pregnant individuals. Currently, six states (California, Washington, DC, New York, Oregon and Washington state) provide comprehensive state-funded coverage to all income-eligible children, regardless of immigration status.

The American Rescue Plan Act 12 gives states the option to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to 12 months beginning in April 2022. Five states—California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington—that are planning to take up this option will also extend the coverage to postpartum individuals who are not eligible due to immigration status. California 13 and Illinois 14 recently implemented 12 months postpartum coverage regardless of immigration status through CHIP Health Services Initiatives amendments.

Some states are also taking action to expand fully state-funded coverage to adult immigrants. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2022-2023 proposed budget would provide fully state-funded Medicaid coverage to all income-eligible adults, ages 26 to 49, regardless of immigration status, no sooner than January 1, 2024. The state previously extended state-funded Medicaid coverage to young adults ages 19-26 regardless of immigration status, and adults ages 50 and older will become eligible on May 1, 2022.

As of July 1 st , 2022, In Oregon, the Cover All People Act (now known as “Healthier Oregon”), extends state-funded coverage to all low-income adults who are not eligible due to immigration status. 15 Prior to this recent state activity, only the District of Columbia’s locally-funded Healthcare Alliance program, created in 1999, provided health coverage to low-income residents regardless of immigration status. 16 States can also provide state-funded premium subsidies to immigrants who are ineligible for federal premium subsidies in the Marketplace due to their immigration status. In Colorado, beginning in 2023, state residents with income up to 300% FPL who do not qualify for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act or other public programs because of their immigration status will be eligible for state-funded premium subsidies to assist them in purchasing individual coverage. 17

The Biden-Harris Administration has proposed changes to public charge policies that are intended to reduce fears of enrolling in health coverage and accessing care. As noted, after taking office, the Administration reversed public charge policies implemented by the Trump Administration that had made some immigrant families more reluctant to access health coverage and care for themselves and their children.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s changes to public charge policy and increased funding for outreach and enrollment assistance may help increase access to health coverage for immigrant families. However, no matter what the government efforts are, they will not reach maximum success unless we put efforts to rebuild trust and reduce fears in the migrant community.

Is There a Solution on The Horizon?

The short-term solution to the migrant crisis and access to health care will entirely rest on the hands of the federal and local governments. The immigrant people are not the problem. Rather, the causes that drive families and individuals to cross borders and the short-sighted and unrealistic ways that politicians respond to them are the problem. The crisis situation is not the number of migrants seeking protection, but the government system's failure to respond in an orderly way.

The cost of not providing health care to immigrants is big, but not as bad as many think. A study by Fernando A. Wilson et al in 2020 showed that the annual expenditures per person were $1629 for unauthorized immigrants and $3795 for authorized immigrants compared with $6088 for US-born individuals. 18

In a recent publication by Steven A. Camarota et al on October 10, 2019, it was estimated that allowing uninsured, low-income illegal immigrants access to Federally funded programs would likely cost taxpayers around $10 billion per year, assuming many chose not to enroll, with costs potentially rising as high as $23 billion. 19

As of today, the majority of the healthcare to be provided to migrants will rest on the hands of safety-net providers, including public and not-for-profit hospitals, federally qualified community health centers (FQHCs), and migrant health centers.

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs)

FQHCs play a pivotal role in the short-term solution.

Jack Geiger and Count D. Gibson Jr. pioneered the founding of the first two health centers in the nation at Columbia Point, Dorchester MA, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, launching a movement in urban and rural areas across the country in 1965.

Delaware’s three health centers—La Red Health Center (mostly serving Sussex County), Henrietta Johnson Health Center and Westside Health Center (both serving mostly New Castle county)—operate 14 sites across the state and provide care for vulnerable patient populations, many of whom have no other options for care. Community Health Centers provide comprehensive services including primary care, dental services, behavioral health care, prenatal services, substance abuse treatment, STD counseling and education and pharmacy.

Since its inception over twenty years ago, La Red Health Center has served an estimated 20,000 unduplicated Hispanic patients. The Center currently provides prenatal services to over 500 Hispanic women every year. La Red Health Center has implemented the nationally recognized evidence-based Navigator outreach program, “The Promotoras,” that has built a defacto support network and through culturally sensitive outreach services, has earned the trust of the local immigrant population. All these efforts are some unique examples of what FQHCs can do to improve the health of an underserved population.

By mission and design, FQHCs exist to serve those who have limited access to healthcare, although all are welcome. We take pride on serving populations that may otherwise find barriers to healthcare in other medical practices.

FQHCs help improve the quality of life for millions of their underserved patients, including immigrants. Their preventative care is cost efficient and allows many patients to have access to affordable immunizations, mammograms, Pap smears, health education, and other preventative services.

FQHCs deliver culturally competent, comprehensive primary care. Thanks to Federal financial support, FQHCs have the ability to provide additional supportive services such as health education, case management, translation, and transportation that promote access to care and break barriers migrants face, that otherwise would result in poor health outcomes.

This makes immigrants a logical population to be served by FQHCs.

There are several challenges that FQHCs might face when delivering charitable healthcare to immigrant populations. Some examples of these challenges include sensitivity to cultural norms, trouble securing financial support, promoting a safe environment, community and patient rejection and lack of financial resources to address more expensive medically necessary procedures or invasive interventions, such as surgeries, dialysis, organ transplants, etc.

Staff members that work in a FQHC are, by the nature of their daily job and training, culturally sensitive and trained to interact in the world of cultural diversity. Therefore, FQHCs are more open to accommodate and understand different cultural norms pertinent to their immigrant population.

People in the community might have different levels of acceptance to the FQHCs attending to the needs of migrants. FQHCs must be prepared to be celebrated or rejected because of this service.

During times of heightened political sensitivity around immigration issues, a FQHC must create an environment that is “safe” for those whose immigration status is questionable. FQHCs must be diligent in reassuring patients and immigrant communities that they will be safe in seeking service from their facilities. Any FQHC that serves an immigrant population should have protocols in place on how to respond should immigration official appear at the clinic to check credentials. Remember – it is difficult to build trust, but very easy to lose it.

Culturally sensitive health care will help bring about positive health outcomes for diverse populations. It can help narrow the gap in health care outcomes and promotes health equity, which must remain as the ultimate goal of our efforts. We must always remember that dignity and quality of health care are rights of all and not the privileges of a few.

Long-Term Solutions

The long-term solution lies far beyond the efforts of local FQHCs, hospitals and migrant health centers. Powerful and financially strong nations must put pressure on foreign governments to honor their responsibility to protect every single person’s rights. They must make sure that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are safe, and are not tortured, discriminated against or left living in poverty.

Migration is often driven by the search for better livelihoods and new opportunities. Indeed, global and regional social and economic inequalities are expressed most powerfully through the figure of the migrant, as one who crosses borders in search of work, education and new horizons.

Highly developed nations should help less fortunate countries stop conflicts, increase average wealth levels, improve education opportunities, improve social security and health insurance, fight extreme poverty, stop discrimination, among other actions to encourage their citizens to remain in their land and be part of future progress.

In order to mitigate the migration issue, it is crucial to stop conflicts and wars so that people are not forced to leave their homes. Governments of developed countries all over the world should work together and should implement financial sanctions to countries which engage in conflicts.

It is imperative that the financial stability in poor countries improves so that people have an incentive to stay home rather than to migrate to other countries in search for better wages and financial opportunities. Rich developed countries should provide not only financial assistance to less fortunate countries but also scientific support so that poor countries can progress and develop by increasing their knowledge, which in turn should translate to progress, better financial stability and higher living standards.

Education is indirectly proportional to level of poverty and it is directly connected to job opportunities. Low levels of education often lead to higher levels of unemployment and poverty.

It is equally important that poor countries have enough government support in case their citizens urgently need it.

We need to guide our efforts to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty. Poverty is the principal cause of global hunger. Many people migrate to a wealthier country just because they are no longer able to survive in their home countries due to extreme poverty.

People all over the world have to become more tolerant towards minorities and have to accept their lifestyles, gender, race and literacy. Discrimination is one of the leading causes of migration.

If we increase overall living conditions in poorly developed countries, people would be less likely to migrate. This includes better access to better wages, health insurance, better access to education, better social security support and overall safer conditions.

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‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Not Supported by Data, Despite High-Profile Cases

Several well-publicized acts of violence by migrants in New York have unsettled some city leaders, but police statistics do not point toward a surge in crime.

Officers entering a New York Police Department van at night in Times Square.

By Maria Cramer ,  María Sánchez Díez and Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner

In the past month, the New York Police Department has described alarming crimes involving young men living in the city’s migrant shelters.

A 15-year-old boy, the police said, shot at an officer in Times Square and hit a tourist. Two officers were kicked and punched on West 42nd Street . A Venezuelan man oversaw a ring of criminals who rode mopeds and snatched purses and cellphones from more than 60 people, most of them women walking alone.

During an early-morning police raid last week in the Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams, dressed in a bulletproof vest over a Fendi scarf, joined officers as they arrested five people accused of perpetrating the robbery spree. “A migrant crime wave is washing over our city,” Police Commissioner Edward Caban told reporters hours later.

Some of the crimes were captured on videos that have since gone viral, leading Republican politicians and their allies to say that migrant criminals are besieging New York.

Quantifying crimes committed by migrants is nearly impossible, because the police are not allowed to ask about a suspect’s immigration status, said Kenneth Corey, a former chief of the department who retired in 2022. But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy.

More than 170,000 migrants have arrived in the city since then, and it is difficult to know what crime statistics would show had they not come. But as the migrant numbers have increased, the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.

The monthly number of robberies since migrants began arriving in large numbers has fluctuated. It peaked at 1,730 in July 2022, hit a low of 1,155 in February 2023 and climbed to 1,417 last month.

Grand larcenies have also gone up and down, but the monthly total stood at 4,056 in January, compared with a high of 4,687 in August 2022.

Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that there was no discernible migrant crime wave.

“I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something significant, meaningful and a departure from the norm,” he said. “So far, what we have are individual incidents of crime.”

Still, immigrants staying in shelters said they had felt a sense of hostility in recent weeks. On subway cars, they said, people slide over to avoid sitting too close to them or make rude comments under their breath.

“They say things in English you don’t understand, but you can tell it’s bad,” Ezequiel Velásquez, a 22-year-old Venezuelan, said in Spanish outside the Row NYC hotel in Times Square, where a migrant shelter has been established.

Because of the recent crimes, he said, people see all migrants the same way: “violent.”

Days after the officers were assaulted in Times Square, a man stood in front of the Row NYC and yelled slurs, said Marcela López, a 38-year-old migrant from Colombia. She could not understand him, but her 11-year-old son translated.

“Immigrant bastard,” the man had said.

The police did not provide statistics to back up Commissioner Caban’s claim of a migrant crime wave and referred questions to a Feb. 5 news conference during which police officials announced the Bronx raid and listed a litany of other crimes likely committed by migrants. Officials at the news conference described a rise in robberies by men on mopeds — a source of transport and employment for many newcomers — since migrants had started to arrive. They also mentioned calls related to domestic violence at shelters, picked pockets, shoplifting and reports of human trafficking.

Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives, said that mopeds were used in 32 different robbery patterns in the first five weeks of the year (a “pattern” refers to several similar crimes committed by one person or a group of people). Last year, there was only one such pattern in the same time period, he said.

The police said they have also been investigating groups of Venezuelan immigrants who they say are engaged in more sophisticated thefts, like hacking into stolen phones and using people’s identification to clear out their bank accounts.

It is not surprising that among a sudden influx of tens of thousands of people, there would be criminals or criminal behavior, said James Essig, a former chief of detectives for the department.

“Any group that comes in, where you’ve got unemployed, young males hanging out in the corners, they’re going to get themselves into trouble,” he said.

Mr. Corey, the former department chief, said that even a tiny percentage of immigrants engaged in criminal behavior could cause a surge in crime and lower people’s sense of security.

“The bigger question is why would we allow people who are clearly engaged in criminal activity — and we’re not talking about a young mother who is shoplifting baby formula to feed her baby — why would we allow them to remain here?” Mr. Corey said.

Some lawmakers have called for repealing a city law that forbids police officers from honoring detention requests issued by immigration authorities without a warrant from a federal judge.

When describing crimes by migrants, officials have largely stuck to anecdotes and videos that have been well publicized . At the February news conference, officials showed a woman being dragged by a thief on a moped. After the assault late last month on two police officers in Times Square, the department released a short clip of the attack, which led to the indictment of about half a dozen men. The story quickly become a staple on Fox News.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, later released longer footage of the assault, which showed that the officers had initiated the encounter, aggressively ordering the men to keep walking before pulling one of them to the side after he appeared to yell an insult at the police. The fracas began after the man resisted.

The focus on particular crimes has created a false sense of chaos and insecurity that threatens law-abiding immigrants, said Ana María Archila, a co-director of the Working Families Party, which is allied with labor unions and community organizations. She noted the Feb. 6 assault by the Guardian Angels of a man the anti-crime group had mistaken for a Venezuelan immigrant. The attack took place just as the group’s leader, Curtis Sliwa, was being interviewed live on Fox News nearby.

“You look at the history of immigration, and you see very clearly that waves of migration are accompanied by diminishing rates of crime,” Ms. Archila said. “It’s also true that waves of migration have been received with racist, xenophobic rhetoric.”

In 2023, researchers at Stanford University found that immigrants were imprisoned at lower rates than people born in the United States . In 2020, a Princeton University study noted that undocumented immigrants in Texas tended to have fewer felony arrests than legal residents .

Mayor Adams, who in September said that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City,” has somewhat softened his tone.

“Any New Yorker that looks at those who are trying to fulfill their next step on the American dream as being criminals, that is wrong,” he told reporters the day of the Bronx raid. “That is not what we’re seeing.”

On Monday, the city announced an 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for migrant shelters. The decision was described as an effort to bring policies at migrant shelters in line with those of traditional homeless shelters, where curfews have existed for years, said Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams.

“This policy will allow for more efficient capacity management,” she said.

Ms. Mamelak said the curfew had nothing to do with the spate of crimes.

On Monday in Manhattan’s East Village, a line of migrants waited outside St. Brigid School, a former Catholic school, where city workers were handing out temporary housing assignments.

The scene was serene. Groups of men talked on benches, their suitcases close at hand, or played soccer in nearby Tompkins Square Park. One man used electric clippers to give haircuts to migrants waiting in line.

Josè Rodriguez, 32, who emigrated from Caracas, Venezuela, to New York 10 months ago, said he had waited outside St. Brigid for three days to try to get a housing assignment.

Shortly after he arrived in the city, his moped was stolen in the Bronx. He reported the crime to the police but they were unable to find it.

Still, he said he felt safer in New York than he ever did in Venezuela, where he was arrested for expressing anti-government opinions. When he heard about the shooting by the 15-year-old in Times Square, he felt dread.

“That’s terrible for us,” he said. “Most of us are coming here for a good life.”

Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas. More about Maria Cramer

The Migrant Crisis in New York City

The arrival of more than 100,000 migrants over the past year has become a crisis for the city’s shelter system, schools and budget..

The Crisis, Explained: Why are large numbers of migrants coming to New York City? And how is the city responding? Here is what to know .

A ‘Migrant Crime Wave’?: Several well-publicized acts of violence by migrants in New York have unsettled some city leaders, but police statistics do not point toward a surge in crime .

Waiting in Line: New York City is required to give a bed to anyone who asks. But as the city reaches a new phase in its homelessness crisis, officials are telling people they have to wait for a place in a shelter .

Low Prices and High Hopes: An ecosystem of barbers, vendors and chefs has sprung up on Randall’s Island , as migrants at one of the city’s largest migrant shelters try to take their fate into their own hands.

Help From the Neighbors:  Many New Yorkers are stepping up to help migrants. Among them, a group of Brooklyn parents raised money for three families evicted  from their shelter and helped them find temporary homes.

Enjoy a completely custom, expertly-written dissertation. Choose from hundreds of writers, all of whom are career specialists in your subject.

110 Immigration Research Paper Topics

choose Immigration Research Paper Topics

Immigration is the process of people moving to a country and can be either voluntary or involuntary. Immigration is a very interesting aspect of education, and you may be asked at one point or another to come up with a research paper in the immigration niche.

Immigration is a broad topic, and it can be difficult to choose immigration research paper topics. Here are some broad categories of immigration.

  • Voluntary migration : This refers to people who move to another country on their own accord and are not forced by the government. It could be for health reasons, lifestyle change, economic reasons, educational reasons, tax evasion, etc.
  • Involuntary migration : This refers to people who are forced to move to another country because there is no other option for them. Examples include migration during a crisis, migration due to fear of persecution, etc.
  • Emigration : This refers to people who decide on their own not to stay in a particular country and return home.
  • Internal migration : This refers to people who move within a country for work or school purposes or simply for personal reasons, such as living closer to family members or friends.

Why Do You Need Help Choosing Immigration Research Paper Topics?  

You’re ready to write your immigration research paper, but you’re scared. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re looking for research paper topics. Why? Because there are so many things that you can write about, it can be hard to know where to start.

You’ve put a lot of thought into the topic, but you’re not sure how to start. Maybe you have a great idea but don’t know where to start writing. Or maybe you’ve already written the outline, but it’s not working out. You feel stuck.

Whatever the case may be, it’s normal to get stressed out when writing a research paper on an important topic like immigration. When you’re in this situation, it can be really helpful to have someone who can point out what works and what doesn’t work with your outline or subject matter. And that’s where we come in.

There are many benefits to getting help with your immigration paper research topics.

  • Immigration research paper topics are hard to come by.

Immigration has been a hot topic for quite some time now. Since the government has been putting a heavy focus on it, there are a lot of different angles to research. This can make it difficult to find a topic that is interesting and relevant to your own life experience.

  • Immigration research paper topics are often controversial.

Immigration is a very touchy subject, which means that it can be hard to find something that accurately reflects your views on the issue without being too extreme or inflammatory.

  • You’ll save time.

If your research paper is due soon, you might not have enough time to do the necessary research and choose topics yourself. Seeking help out there makes your work easier and saves you from stress!

  • It will be well detailed.

Other than just looking at things from your point of view, seeking help from other sources can help you get detailed in-depth approaches.

Immigration Research Paper Topics

As a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic and other global military wars, the difficulties associated with immigration are now more widely recognized in the world. Are you looking for good topics to write about for your immigration research paper? If so, the list below includes some of the top options:

  • How did the Covid-19 pandemic affect immigration into the UK and the United States?
  • How does immigration affect the global economy?
  • What are the benefits and disadvantages of immigration?
  • What are the top five benefits of being an immigrant?
  • What is the relationship between immigration and crime?
  • How does the cost of immigration compare with other factors that influence business?
  • How do illegal immigrants affect our economy and society, and how can they be made legal?
  • What are the most common reasons people apply for a U.S. visa?
  • What are some of the benefits of having an immigration visa program in the U.S.?
  • How many countries have a visa waiver program with the U.S. and how does it work?

Simple Immigration Essay Topics

Selecting a simple topic for an immigration essay is not always an easy thing to do. At times, it requires you to spend a lot of time doing research here and there. To save you from this stress, we have compiled the top ten simple immigration essay topics for you!

  • How has immigration impacted your life?
  • What are your thoughts on illegal immigration?
  • How would you improve the process for naturalized citizens?
  • What are some of the challenges associated with immigration?  
  • Give some examples of how immigration benefits the U.S.  
  • What is the motivation for immigration?
  • Discuss the attitude of nativism towards immigrants.
  • How has being an immigrant changed the way you think about yourself?  
  • What is the greatest barrier to becoming a citizen?
  • What would you say to people who believe that immigrants should not be allowed into the U.S.?

International Immigration Essay Topics

We have compiled 10 international immigration essay topics for your essay because when it comes to choosing topics about immigration internationally, you need to make sure it covers the entire world of immigration. This can often be a difficult process.

  • How have international immigration policies changed over time?
  • How can we increase our understanding of the diversity of the world’s cultures?
  • What are some of the benefits of allowing more immigration?
  • Describe the UK’s current immigration system.
  • Discuss Canada’s 20th-century immigration policies.
  • Talk about the EU’s current immigration problems and how they affect the terrorism rate.
  • Examine the connection between immigration and Australian national identity.
  • Describe Switzerland’s newest immigration law.
  • Examine the effects of Muslim immigration on Britain.
  • Examine the importance of gender in Irish immigration.

Best Immigration Research Topics

Do you want to come up with the best topic for your essay in your class? We also want you to be the best, so we’ve put together a list of some of the best topics on immigration that you could pick from.

  • The impact of immigration on wages and employment levels
  • The impact of immigration on public health and other social outcomes
  • The impact of immigration on local governments and their budgets
  • How immigrants help contribute to economic growth
  • What are the best ways to attract immigrants to your country?
  • The impact of immigration on education and health care
  • What is the relationship between immigration and terrorism?
  • Does immigration increase or decrease social cohesion?
  • What effect immigration has on things like forests, water sources, and wildlife habitats.
  • What are the best ways to encourage new immigrants to stay in their new home country?

Immigration Argumentative Essay Topics

Because you would need to compare and view the issue from all sides, choosing an argumentative immigration topics to write about could be challenging. To make your job easier, we have compiled a list of 10 argumentative immigration essay ideas for you below.

  • Immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens who deserve them.
  • Should an immigrant be given a path to citizenship?
  • Do you think that it is important for countries to take in refugees who are fleeing war-torn countries?
  • Immigrants contribute to the growth of our economy, our culture, and our society.
  • Should immigrants pay taxes?
  • Should immigration from certain countries be limited based on their economic impact on the country?
  • Should incentives be given to people who want to immigrate legally instead of illegally?
  • Should businesses be permitted to hire foreign workers over Americans if they can’t find any eligible Americans?
  • Should immigrants be allowed to stay in the country indefinitely?
  • Should people be treated differently based on their immigration status?  

Controversial Immigration Topics

When we discuss contentious topics, we typically engage in debate or discussion of divergent viewpoints. Finding a topic on this can be difficult at times, but don’t worry; to relieve some of your tension, we’ve selected 10 contentious immigration topics for research paper that you can choose from or use as a reference:  

  • Should gay couples be allowed to marry?
  • Race and Immigration
  • Ethnicity and Immigration
  • Should non-citizens be able to vote?
  • Is it okay for parents to get deported because they refuse to pay child support?
  • Undocumented immigrants and identity theft.
  • Deportation rates for undocumented immigrants
  • Immigration: Illegals vs. Legal Immigrants
  • The wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

Immigration Thesis Topics

Choosing a thesis topic on immigration requires extensive research because the paper needs to be outstanding and well written. Do you need a thesis for an academic degree? Here are 10 thesis immigration topics for essays that could help you.

  • The historical impact of immigration on America
  • The impact of immigration on the economy
  • The impact of immigration on our culture and society
  • Why should immigrants be allowed into the United States?
  • How can we make sure that immigrants are treated fairly and humanely in America?
  • Immigration is a major issue that affects Americans in many ways.
  • Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes
  • Immigrants do not make any significant difference in the unemployment rate of native-born Americans
  • Immigrants create more jobs than they take
  • Immigrants need government assistance to survive

Global Politics Immigration Paper Topics

Global politics is a large topic. So, finding suitable global political immigration topics may be a bit tiresome. Here are 10 global research topics on immigration that you can choose from!

  • Immigration policies in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
  • International trade and immigration policies.
  • The diversity of immigrants: A look at America’s immigrant population.
  • The social structure of immigrants in the Netherlands.
  • Globalization and migration patterns: A case study of Australia.
  • Global recessions, financial crises, and the labor market.
  • Immigration policy and human rights violations
  • Migration patterns around the world
  • The history of immigration in the U.S.
  • Political and economic implications of immigration in Europe

Illegal Immigration Research Paper Topics

Illegal immigration is a big problem for law enforcement and the national security of many countries. It also often leads to violations of the human rights of the most vulnerable people.

Would you like to investigate this for a research paper? Here are some illegal immigration topics to research that can help.

  • The effects of illegal immigration on businesses
  • Illegal immigration and public safety
  • Illegal immigration and workplace discrimination
  • The impact of illegal immigration on the American workforce
  • How does illegal immigration affect the U.S?
  • Should illegal immigration be legalized?
  • What are some of the consequences of legalizing illegal immigrants?
  • What are some benefits of legalizing illegal immigrants?
  • How many people illegally immigrate to the U.S. every year?
  • How are illegal immigrants treated by society?

Research Paper Topics on Immigration in America

Are you seeking a topic to write about for a research paper about immigration in America? Here are 10 excellent American immigration research paper topics for you.  

  • Why America’s immigration policies are unfair and unproductive, and why we need to change them.
  • Why the Mexican border is a good immigration channel
  • Border security and border policy in the U.S.
  • How does immigrant crime compare to native crime?
  • Immigrants are more likely to have good grades than native-born Americans
  • Which groups of immigrants have been most affected by the rise in deportations and why?
  • Are immigrants more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans?
  • Immigrants have made incredible contributions to the U.S., like Levi Strauss and Albert Einstein
  • Should undocumented immigrants have health insurance coverage in the U.S.?
  • The Effect of Immigration on Social Security in the U.S.

Persuasive Speech Topics About Immigration

You need to make sure the topics you choose for your persuasive speeches are compelling enough to win over your audience. Finding a topic like this could be difficult, but we have nonetheless put together a list of the top 10 persuasive immigration topics for essay from which you can choose.

  • Should immigration be a human right?
  • Can immigrants help economies grow and make countries better
  • Why immigration is not a threat to our culture but a benefit
  • We need more immigrants in this country because it’s not sustainable otherwise!
  • Immigrants are an asset to any country, not a burden.
  • Are most immigrants hard-working, honest, and law-abiding citizens?
  • Illegal immigration is not a problem—it’s a solution to problems—like unemployment and poverty
  • The U.S. needs immigrants to keep growing and stay strong in the world economy
  • Are immigrants good for business and do they make great contributions to society?
  • Immigrants bring in new ideas and experiences that enrich culture and nation growth.

How to Choose a Topic on Immigration

Choosing a topic for your immigration research paper is a big decision. You have to consider your audience, the content of the paper, and how much time you have to write it. Here are some tips for choosing the best immigration research paper topics.

  • Know your audience.

You can’t write an immigration research paper if you don’t know who you’re writing it for! Before you start writing, sit down with the person in charge of your assignment (usually the professor) and get their feedback on what they need from you. This will help you narrow down topics that they’ll find interesting and relevant, which will make them more excited about reading your work!

  • Look at what’s already out there.

You may want to try writing something new, but don’t forget about other people’s work! Go online and check out any papers written by professors on similar topics in your field. Have them give their opinions about whether or not those papers are good examples of quality work done well. If they love something else, maybe those details can help inspire yours!

  • Do your research.

Do some research on current events. This is where most of the immigration news comes from, so it’s a great way to find out what’s happening in your community.

Read blogs and articles from reliable sources like newspapers or websites that focus on profiling immigrants and people who are looking for asylum.

Immigration research paper topics could be challenging to find. Sometimes they are complex and require an in-depth understanding. Here are 110 immigration research paper topics you can choose from. Sometimes, you might need help in writing your research paper. You can always outsource your research paper to a trusted writing company to help you!

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Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants.

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Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.

In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.

Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Biden’s time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.

Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last month on social media . Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

“What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”

How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge “deportation force” or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trump’s four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nation’s interior as Barack Obama’s administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute .

Read: The GOP’s true priority

Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.

This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month .) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.

Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. “If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume that’s what they will try to do in a second term,” said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job . (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)

Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Miller’s most extreme immigration ideas during Trump’s term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trump’s four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. “Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy,” Taylor said.

Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.

In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”

The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

Read: The specter of family separation

Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.

Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. “It’s not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented,” said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.

All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale he’s discussing.

Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to “break down doors” in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.

“You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings,” Houser said. “Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.” He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.

Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine , told me, “There’s no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time.” The example Trump most often cites as a model is “Operation Wetback,” the mass-deportation program—named for a slur against Mexican Americans—launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communities in cities such as Los Angeles. Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.

The Republican response to Texas’s standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues . The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that he’ll build more of the barriers nonetheless. “We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence,” Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border , where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.

But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.

The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.

The governors provided those forces to Trump under what’s known as “hybrid status” for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their state’s governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isn’t particularly unusual; what made that deployment “unprecedented,” in Joseph Nunn’s phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that don’t want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because it’s not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois’ constitutional rights. “Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal,” Nunn said. “One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving state’s consent.”

But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.

“There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,” Nunn told me. “There are quite literally no safeguards.”

Read: America’s immigration reckoning has arrived

The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.

In fact, as I’ve written , a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”

Read our research on: Immigration & Migration | Podcasts | Election 2024

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Key findings about u.s. immigrants.

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View  interactive charts and  detailed tables  on U.S. immigrants.

Note: For our most recent estimates of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.  click here .

The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world . Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants. The population of immigrants is also very diverse, with just about every country in the world represented among U.S. immigrants.

Pew Research Center regularly publishes statistical portraits of the nation’s foreign-born population, which include historical trends since 1960 . Based on these portraits, here are answers to some key questions about the U.S. immigrant population.

How many people in the U.S. are immigrants?

The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system , the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.7% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.8%) in 1970. However, today’s immigrant share remains below the record 14.8% share in 1890, when 9.2 million immigrants lived in the U.S.

Immigrant share of U.S. population nears historic high

What is the legal status of immigrants in the U.S.?

Unauthorized immigrants are almost a quarter of U.S. foreign-born population

Most immigrants (77%) are in the country legally, while almost a quarter are unauthorized, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on census data adjusted for undercount . In 2017, 45% were naturalized U.S. citizens.

Some 27% of immigrants were permanent residents and 5% were temporary residents in 2017. Another 23% of all immigrants were unauthorized immigrants. From 1990 to 2007, the unauthorized immigrant population more than tripled in size – from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million in 2007. By 2017, that number had declined by 1.7 million, or 14%. There were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017, accounting for 3.2% of the nation’s population.

The decline in the unauthorized immigrant population is due largely to a fall in the number from Mexico – the single largest group of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Between 2007 and 2017, this group decreased by 2 million. Meanwhile, there was a rise in the number from Central America and Asia. 

Do all lawful immigrants choose to become U.S. citizens?

Not all lawful permanent residents choose to pursue U.S. citizenship. Those who wish to do so may apply after meeting certain requirements , including having lived in the U.S. for five years. In fiscal year 2019, about 800,000 immigrants applied for naturalization. The number of naturalization applications has climbed in recent years, though the annual totals remain below the 1.4 million applications filed in 2007.

Generally, most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply to become citizens. However, Mexican lawful immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate overall. Language and personal barriers, lack of interest and financial barriers are among the top reasons for choosing not to naturalize cited by Mexican-born green card holders, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey .

Where do immigrants come from?

Mexico, China and India are among top birthplaces for immigrants in the U.S.

Mexico is the top origin country of the U.S. immigrant population. In 2018, roughly 11.2 million immigrants living in the U.S. were from there, accounting for 25% of all U.S. immigrants. The next largest origin groups were those from China (6%), India (6%), the Philippines (4%) and El Salvador (3%).

By region of birth, immigrants from Asia combined accounted for 28% of all immigrants, close to the share of immigrants from Mexico (25%). Other regions make up smaller shares: Europe, Canada and other North America (13%), the Caribbean (10%), Central America (8%), South America (7%), the Middle East and North Africa (4%) and sub-Saharan Africa (5%).

Who is arriving today?

Among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumber Hispanics

More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000).

By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2009. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years.

Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing Hispanics. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2065, those who identify as Asian will make up some 38% of all immigrants; as Hispanic, 31%; White, 20%; and Black, 9%.

Is the immigrant population growing?

U.S. foreign-born population reached 45 million in 2015, projected to reach 78 million by 2065

New immigrant arrivals have fallen, mainly due to a decrease in the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the U.S. The drop in the unauthorized immigrant population can primarily be attributed to more Mexican immigrants leaving the U.S. than coming in . 

Looking forward, immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 88% of U.S. population growth through 2065 , assuming current immigration trends continue. In addition to new arrivals, U.S. births to immigrant parents will be important to future growth in the country’s population. In 2018, the percentage of women giving birth in the past year was higher among immigrants (7.5%) than among the U.S. born (5.7%). While U.S.-born women gave birth to more than 3 million children that year, immigrant women gave birth to about 760,000.

How many immigrants have come to the U.S. as refugees?

More than half of U.S. refugees in 2019 were from D.R. Congo and Burma

Since the creation of the federal Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980, about 3 million refugees have been resettled in the U.S. – more than any other country.

In fiscal 2019, a total of 30,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S. The largest origin group of refugees was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, followed by Burma (Myanmar), Ukraine, Eritrea and Afghanistan. Among all refugees admitted in fiscal year 2019, 4,900 are Muslims (16%) and 23,800 are Christians (79%). Texas, Washington, New York and California resettled more than a quarter of all refugees admitted in fiscal 2018.

Where do most U.S. immigrants live?

Nearly half (45%) of the nation’s immigrants live in just three states: California (24%), Texas (11%) and Florida (10%) . California had the largest immigrant population of any state in 2018, at 10.6 million. Texas, Florida and New York had more than 4 million immigrants each.

In terms of regions, about two-thirds of immigrants lived in the West (34%) and South (34%). Roughly one-fifth lived in the Northeast (21%) and 11% were in the Midwest.

In 2018, most immigrants lived in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in the New York, Los Angeles and Miami metro areas. These top 20 metro areas were home to 28.7 million immigrants, or 64% of the nation’s total foreign-born population. Most of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population lived in these top metro areas as well.

20 metropolitan areas with the largest number of immigrants in 2018

How do immigrants compare with the U.S. population overall in education?

Educational attainment among U.S. immigrants, 2018

Immigrants in the U.S. as a whole have lower levels of education than the U.S.-born population. In 2018, immigrants were over three times as likely as the U.S. born to have not completed high school (27% vs. 8%). However, immigrants were just as likely as the U.S. born to have a bachelor’s degree or more (32% and 33%, respectively).

Educational attainment varies among the nation’s immigrant groups, particularly across immigrants from different regions of the world. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U.S. born (54% and 47%, respectively, do not have a high school diploma, vs. 8% of U.S. born). On the other hand, immigrants from every region except Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America were as likely as or more likely than U.S.-born residents to have a bachelor’s or advanced degree.

Among all immigrants, those from South Asia (71%) were the most likely to have a bachelor’s degree or more. Immigrants from Mexico (7%) and Central America (11%) were the least likely to have a bachelor’s or higher.

How many immigrants are working in the U.S.?

Total U.S. labor force grows since 2007, but number of unauthorized immigrant workers declines

In 2017, about 29 million immigrants were working or looking for work in the U.S., making up some 17% of the total civilian labor force. Lawful immigrants made up the majority of the immigrant workforce, at 21.2 million. An additional 7.6 million immigrant workers are unauthorized immigrants , less than the total of the previous year and notably less than in 2007, when they were 8.2 million. They alone account for 4.6% of the civilian labor force, a dip from their peak of 5.4% in 2007. During the same period, the overall U.S. workforce grew, as did the number of U.S.-born workers and lawful immigrant workers.

Immigrants are projected to drive future growth in the U.S. working-age population through at least 2035. As the Baby Boom generation heads into retirement, immigrants and their children are expected to offset a decline in the working-age population by adding about 18 million people of working age between 2015 and 2035.

How well do immigrants speak English?

Half of immigrants in U.S. are English proficient as of 2018

Among immigrants ages 5 and older in 2018, half (53%) are proficient English speakers – either speaking English very well (37%) or only speaking English at home (17%).

Immigrants from Mexico have the lowest rates of English proficiency (34%), followed by those from Central America (35%), East and Southeast Asia (50%) and South America (56%). Immigrants from Canada (96%), Oceania (82%), Europe (75%) and sub-Saharan Africa (74%) have the highest rates of English proficiency.  

The longer immigrants have lived in the U.S. , the greater the likelihood they are English proficient. Some 47% of immigrants living in the U.S. five years or less are proficient. By contrast, more than half (57%) of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more are proficient English speakers.

Among immigrants ages 5 and older, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language . Some 42% of immigrants in the U.S. speak Spanish at home. The top five languages spoken at home among immigrants outside of Spanish are English only (17%), followed by Chinese (6%), Hindi (5%), Filipino/Tagalog (4%) and French (3%).

How many immigrants have been deported recently?

Around 337,000 immigrants were deported from the U.S. in fiscal 2018 , up since 2017. Overall, the Obama administration deported about 3 million immigrants between 2009 and 2016, a significantly higher number than the 2 million immigrants deported by the Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. In 2017, the Trump administration deported 295,000 immigrants, the lowest total since 2006.

Immigrants convicted of a crime made up the less than half of deportations in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics by criminal status are available. Of the 337,000 immigrants deported in 2018, some 44% had criminal convictions and 56% were not convicted of a crime. From 2001 to 2018, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported have not been convicted of a crime.

U.S. deportations of immigrants slightly up in 2018

How many immigrant apprehensions take place at the U.S.-Mexico border?

The number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border has doubled from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2019, from 396,579 in fiscal 2018 to 851,508 in fiscal 2019. Today, there are more apprehensions of non-Mexicans than Mexicans at the border. In fiscal 2019, apprehensions of Central Americans at the border exceeded those of Mexicans for the fourth consecutive year. The first time Mexicans did not make up the bulk of Border Patrol apprehensions was in 2014.

How do Americans view immigrants and immigration?

U.S. immigrants are seen more as a strength than a burden to the country

While immigration has been at the forefront of a national political debate, the U.S. public holds a range of views about immigrants living in the country. Overall, a majority of Americans have positive views about immigrants. About two-thirds of  Americans (66%) say immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents,” while about a quarter (24%) say immigrants burden the country by taking jobs, housing and health care.

Yet these views vary starkly by political affiliation. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 88% think immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents, and just 8% say they are a burden. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 41% say immigrants strengthen the country, while 44% say they burden it.

Americans were divided on future levels of immigration. A quarter said legal immigration to the U.S. should be decreased (24%), while one-third (38%) said immigration should be kept at its present level and almost another third (32%) said immigration should be increased.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 3, 2017, and written by Gustavo López, a former research analyst focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics; and Kristen Bialik, a former research assistant.

CORRECTION (Sept. 21, 2020): An update to the methodology used to tabulate figures in the chart “Among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumber Hispanics” has changed all figures from 2001 and 2012. This new methodology has also allowed the inclusion of the figure from 2000. Furthermore, the earlier version of the chart incorrectly showed the  partial  year shares of Hispanic and Asian recent arrivals in 2015; the corrected  complete  year shares are 31% and 36%, respectively.

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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