The U.S. government released a report on Friday, Aug. 18, 2006, about illegal immigration, putting the estimated number of illegals at 11 million at the start of 2006. The full report, from the Office of Immigration Statistics in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (the renamed INS) - in turn a part of the Department of Homeland Security - is available as a PDF here:
http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/publications/ILL_PE_2005.pdf.
While most illegal immigrants come from Mexico and other countries south of the border, the country with the highest percentage change is India, with a 133 percent growth in illegals between 2000 and 2005, the period covered by the report. India is #4 in the total numbers (after Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala), with no other South Asian country in the top 10 or mentioned in the seven-page report. India now accounts for about 3 percent of the illegal population.
India has 280,000 illegals in 2005, up from 120,000 in 2000, accounting for about 2.6 percent of the total, up from 1 percent. By contrast the percentage of U.S. citizens of Indian origin as a total of the U.S. population is less than 0.7 percent (if you count 2 million out of 300 million).
The top 10 countries are (with their 2005 and 2000 numbers):
- Mexico (5.9 million/4.6 million)
- El Salvador (470,000/430,000)
- Guatemala (370,000/290,000)
- India (280,000/120,000)
- China (230,000/190,000)
- Korea (210,000/180,000)
- Phillipines (210,000/200,000)
- Honduras (180,000/160,000)
- Brazil (170,000/100,000)
- Vietnam (160,000/160,000)
Interestingly, the opening lines of the report say:
Estimating the size of the unauthorized population living in the United States is challenging because of data limitations. There are no national surveys, administrative data, or other sources of information that directly provide accurate estimates of this population. As a consequence, the unauthorized immigrant population must be estimated by making certain assumptions and by combining data that measure events with those that measure populations.
Here are links to some stories on this topic.
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[Thanks to Sendhil Revuluri for help with some of the calculations for this story.]
