NEW INS REPORT ON UNAUTHORIZED ALIEN POPULATION

In response to a demand from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the Chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, the INS has produced a new method of estimating the undocumented alien population in the US. The INS recently made a draft report of its findings available to Rep. Smith, who has posted the document on his website. The release of these numbers has already played a role in the increasingly heated debate over the Latino and Immigrant Fairness Act.

The old INS method of counting the unauthorized alien population was limited to producing a snapshot of a point in time and the growth rate it predicted was based on estimates that did not always hold true. Under the new method, the INS takes data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) that has been corrected for undercounting by the Census Bureau, and then makes its own undercount adjustment. Before, the INS did not make its own adjustment. Under the new method, unauthorized aliens include asylum seekers and adjustment of status applicants, over 1 million people. It also includes aliens in institutions, such as prisons and the military, who are not included in the CPS.

While producing a more accurate picture of the unauthorized immigrant population, the new method does have some drawbacks. First, it is able to determine only the general region where a person is from, Mexico, the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and the Eastern Hemisphere. The old method was able to break the information down by country of origin. Also, the new method no longer distinguishes between people who entered without inspection and those who overstayed a nonimmigrant visa. The new method is able to distinguish between male and female entrants, which the old method was not.

To reach its final conclusions, the INS subtracted the number of legal aliens it had record of from the CPS data that was adjusted for undercount by both the Census Bureau and the INS. It then estimated the number of unauthorized aliens who entered the US each year. Finally, the number of unauthorized aliens in the US in January 1987 to get an idea of the numbers entering each year and the way the population changed from 1987 to 1997.

The INS determined that 41 percent of the foreign born population that entered between 1987 and 1996 was unauthorized. From Mexico, 75 percent of men were unauthorized, and 74 percent of women were unauthorized. From the rest of the Western Hemisphere, 46 percent of men and 41 percent of men were unauthorized. From Eastern Europe, 18 percent of men and 14 percent of women were unauthorized. In 1997 there were 3.1 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico, 1.2 million from the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and 835,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere.

As of January 1997, the total unauthorized population was 5.1 million, about what the previous INS estimate was. The number of unauthorized people entering the US each year increased from 580,000 in 1987 to 835,000 in 1989, fell to 505,000 in 1993 and has fallen steadily each year since to about 135,000 in 1996. The total growth in the unauthorized population, considering those in the unauthorized population who leave the US, either by death, migration or deportation, was 585,000 in 1989, and dropped to 65,000 by 1996. While these numbers are very close to the previous INS estimates of the unauthorized population, the new method allows better calculation of population growth trends.

The 1987 base numbers do not include about 2.5 million people who were unauthorized at the time but who were subsequently legalized under the Immigration Reform and Control Act. This leaves a base number for 1987 of 2,075,000. From this base number, there was 20 percent growth in 1989 and 15 percent growth in 1990. After that, the growth rate has steadily declined to a current rate of about one percent growth. According to the INS, the increase during 1987-1990 was due to two primary factors. First, IRCA reduced the base level unauthorized population, so fewer entrants would produce a higher growth rate. Second, in the years immediately following IRCA, there was an increase in the number of women and children coming from Mexico to join husbands and fathers who had obtained legal status in the US. While the INS does attribute some of this growth to the impact of IRCA, it is also careful to state that "the effect of IRCA on these population trends is uncertain," a statement that must be remembered in the debate over whether amnesties encourage undocumented immigration.

One trend the statistics clearly show is a significant drop-off in the number of unauthorized entrants to the US after 1990. While the reasons for this are beyond the scope of this study, the INS does suggest some reasons. First, there was a drop-off in the number of people coming to join people legalized under IRCA. Second, after 1990 there was an increase in the number of immigrant visas available for legal immigration. Third, conditions in countries that represented a large portion of unauthorized entrants have improved.

Not only has there been a decrease in the number of people entering the US, there has been a substantial increase in the number of unauthorized aliens leaving the US since 1990. In 1987 220,000 people left the unauthorized population. By 1996 this number was 400,000. Given the increasing rate of deportation since then, it is likely that this number has continued to increase.

The INS plans to work with the new method it has created to make it yield more data, including country of origin and US states where unauthorized entrants settle. This method may be more accurate than the previous one, but the fact that its results are so similar to earlier INS estimates shows that those earlier estimates were not giving an inaccurate picture of the unauthorized population.

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