Populations of illegal immigrants large enough for the U.S. Census Bureau to count have moved into 42 states, according to a new analysis of the 11.3 million in America.
About 1.7 million live in just four California counties alone, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Riverside.
And in two non-border counties, Cook in Illinois and Queens in New York, there are over 500,000 illegals.
In a series of maps drawn from federal data, the Migration Policy Institute report titled Settling In: A Profile of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population in the United States, shows where the illegal immigrants are, how long they have been in the United States, and which country has sent the most. That title goes to Mexico. There are nearly six million illegal immigrants from Mexico in the country.
What’s more, the group said that more than half of all illegal immigrants have lived in the United States for at least 10 years, based on Census data.
The group said:
“The unauthorized immigrant population is a long-settled group. Sixty-two percent of unauthorized immigrants had lived in the United States for at least ten years during the period analyzed, with 21 percent in the country for 20 years or more.
“The states with the longest-settled unauthorized populations are those in the Southwest: California (where 71 percent had lived in the United States for a decade or more as of 2012-16), Arizona (70 percent), New Mexico (69 percent), Colorado (68 percent), and Illinois (67 percent). These are also states where relatively high shares of the unauthorized population had their origins in Mexico. Notably, states considered to be new destinations for unauthorized immigrants in the 2000s—such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas—showed relatively long-term resident unauthorized populations by 2012-16.”
While illegal immigrants are found in big numbers in 42 states, they are also likely in the remaining eight states — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota — but “characteristics of unauthorized immigrants could not be estimated due to small samples,” said the pro-immigration group.
It also said that illegal immigrants have had 4.1 million children born in the United States from 2012-2016. They automatically become U.S. citizens.
The group added that new calls to end so-called birthright citizenship would not impact those 4.1 million.
