Security and Sovereignty No. 4: How Many Illegal Aliens are in America?

In the first three postings in this series, I discussed security and sovereignty, the ground rules, and the powers and duties of the President with respect to national security and sovereignty. In this 4th posting, I address the question of how many illegal aliens are in America. The short answer is we don’t know.

There are a variety of reasons we don’t know how many illegal aliens have infiltrated America. First, it is an organized criminal activity of people smuggling, illegal documentation, illegal hiring, and conspiracy to protect the status quo. Second, we also have differing government agendas at all levels from local, to state, to national. The agenda of a sanctuary city (see the list of cities in the reference given below[1]) and the agenda of the Border Patrol are quite different. The sanctuary cities seek to underreport the influx and number of resident aliens for law enforcement purposes but inflate the statistics if federal funds are available. The Border Patrol would like to maximize the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions they report but underreport the number they miss that are in America. Usually you hear statements that about three get through for every one caught. The Census Bureau does not separate legal from illegal immigrants in their reporting, but, it is generally assumed that about 2/3 of their reported immigrants are illegal. But, as I will show, the numbers don’t easily add up to present a clear picture. One reason is that the Census reports “immigrants living” in America, in the census of households, not the number of immigrants “present” in America. For example, the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2000 from Census Bureau statistics was estimated as between 8 and 11 million (see here) with 700,000 – 800,000 new illegal aliens settling in the U.S. each year and about 1 million per year recently. The numbers don’t add up; if we had nearly a million illegal immigrants settling per year between 2000 and 2005 and added them to the 8 to 11 million here in 2000, how can the Pew Hispanic Center (see here) say that there are 11.5 to 12 million here now up from 8.4 million in 2000? You simply cannot get good numbers. Another part of the problem is that some illegal aliens travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico and a lot of illegal immigrants move around with job opportunities, peer/family pressure, and for whatever reasons, within America and these latter groups are not well represented in the Census data.

But, we can make some simple calculations to get some rough estimates (maybe correct with a factor of +/- 25 to +/-50%) of how many illegal aliens are in America (living, working, traveling; all of them currently here at any given time). If there are about 12 million living here now, about a million per year entering each year (see here), about 500,000 more per year living in the U.S. (see here), then perhaps there are about twice as many actually in the country at any given time as are recorded as living here by the Census Bureau. Thus, there may be about 12 million x 2 = 24 million illegal aliens here today. The Pew survey (see here) also estimated that there were about 7.2 million illegal alien workers now in America. Given that the Pew survey data for illegal aliens living in the U.S. in 2000 was 8.4 million and the Census based estimates were from 8 to 11 million, a reasonable range for the number of illegal aliens working in the U.S. currently might be from 7 to 10 million. With such huge variations in the estimates, perhaps it is reasonable to take the average of the estimates as a mid-range estimate. Therefore, the total number of illegal aliens in the U.S. now is probably around (12+24)/2 = 18 million and the total number of illegal alien workers now in the U.S. is probably about (7+10)/2 = 8.5 million. A couple of final comments on these numbers are needed. There are several sources of estimates available in books [1], magazines, newspapers, and in the Internet; I chose two that represented a range from low to high values. And secondly, whether the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. is now 12 or 24 million it is a huge number and whether the number of workers is 7 or 10 million, it too is a huge number. Readers with better estimates are most welcome to provide them. Good luck. Generalized conclusions on the impacts of illegal aliens in the U.S. will probably not change whether there are 12, 18, or 24 million of them. The readers of this posting and subsequent ones in this series are urged to keep the uncertainty in mind. I hope we can reach the same general conclusions from the numbers whether we use the low, average, or high values.

For example, federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat “emergency” patients even if they are illegal aliens, and given the huge legal pressures from pro-open border groups (e.g. the ACLU), few, if any, hospitals or their doctors or nurses dare ask if it is really an emergency [1]. Trauma centers are closing in many places because they are swamped with huge medical costs from millions of illegal immigrants who get their free medical care in emergency rooms. Does it matter if there are 12, 18, or 24 million illegal immigrants if their numbers are sufficient to bankrupt a hospital due to un-reimbursed costs? A federal judge can mandate universal and free health care for illegal aliens, but that does not mean that the federal government pays for it. And, it does not mean that U.S. citizens can hope to get the same quality of free, best in the world, health care. Absolutely not! U.S. citizens see their publicly funded health care being rationed and declining in quality. U.S. citizens paying their own health care costs have seen rationing and declining quality through the rise of HMO’s and “managed health care”. So does it make it any less unfair that illegal aliens get better health care than America’s poor or America’s workers paying for their own health care if there are 12, 18, or 24 million illegal aliens in the country? Similarly, illegal alien children get free education, and in addition, costly additional help through English as a Second Language and similar programs. Does it matter if there are 12, 18, or 24 million illegal aliens if their children get free, but more expensive to the U.S. taxpayers, education than do U.S. children?

The next posting in this series will deal with some of the economic impacts of illegal immigration and the illegal aliens in America. Like assessment of the numbers of illegal aliens in the U.S., their huge negative economic impact on America is hard to assess. If we don’t know their numbers it is hard to get accurate economic impact data. Therefore, most of our economic analyses will be by example and will emphasize two small businesses, one a legal enterprise, and one a criminal operation based on breaking the laws of the United States.
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1. Hayworth, J. D. 2006. Whatever It Takes: Illegal immigration, Border Security, and the War on Terror. Regency Pub., Inc. Washington, DC 20001, 230 pp.