The yearly inflow of illegal immigrants into the United States has significantly declined over the past three years, according to a report released Thursday.
The report by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan D.C. think tank, estimated that from 2000 to 2004, an average of 800,000 unauthorized immigrants entered the United States per year, but this number fell to 500,000 from 2005 to 2008.
Though the growth rate has decreased, the overall population of undocumented immigrants in the United States has increased by more than 40 percent since 2000, the report said.
Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center and co-author of the report, said that for the first time in about 10 years, the inflow of legal immigrants has surpassed that of illegal immigrants.
“It’s not surprising to me that the [growth rate] of unauthorized migrants has dropped below the rate of authorized immigrants,” said Tim Freilich, legal director of the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Immigrant Advocacy Program, based in Charlottesville. “For various reasons, many employers seek out and employ immigrants because they can cheat them out of their wages.”
Alan Kraut, professor of history at American University, said that because the process to enter the country legally often takes years, legal immigrants tend to stay more frequently.
“Because they’ve been on the list for so long, they’re not going to turn around immediately,” he said.
Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates less immigration into the country, said the conclusions from the Pew study were similar to his findings from a recent report.
