Posted on 06/15/2005 5:32:53 PM PDT by calcowgirl
One quarter of the country's 10.3 million illegal immigrants have some college education and live with families, shattering a stereotype that this sector of the population is made up of poorly educated single men who work menial jobs, according to a national report released Tuesday.
The report from the Pew Hispanic Center paints a portrait of the illegal-immigrant population in the United States that will be important as the country debates the controversial subject of immigration reform.
"The stereotype we all know is single males working in agriculture," said Doris Meisner, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, which commissioned the study. "That is not the reality today."
Jeffrey S. Passel, senior research associate for Pew and author of the report, found that one quarter of illegal immigrants in the U.S. have some college education and another quarter completed high school.
Still, 49 percent of illegal immigrants have less than a high school education, making them less educated than legal immigrants and the general U.S. population.
The Pew report also found that an estimated 13.9 million people -- one-third are children -- live in households where one head of household or a spouse is undocumented. More than one-fourth are U.S. citizens.
"The policy we come up for dealing with immigrants, particularly for undocumented, puts people into little boxes," Passel said. "Well, this says, wait a minute, the box is a whole family and not everybody in there is the same."
Passel's report dismantled another widely held assumption: Only 3 percent of the undocumented immigrants work in agriculture. The greatest numbers, 33 percent, work in the service industry.
The rest work in construction, production, installation and repair, sales and administration, transportation and material moving, and management and business.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Unauthorized Migrants, Numbers and Characteristics
Yup, doing the jobs the rest of us lazy americans won't do..
Pew Hispanic Center Offers Fuller Portrait of Unauthorized Migrants
Most Live in Families And An Increasing Number Have High School Educations
Washington, DC - Contrary to the stereotype of undocumented migrants as single males with very little education who perform manual labor in agriculture or construction, a new Pew Hispanic Center report shows that most of the unauthorized population lives in families, a quarter has at least some college education and that illegal workers can be found in many sectors of the US economy.
Building on previous work that estimated the size and geographic dispersal of the undocumented population, the new report offers a portrait of that population in unprecedented detail by examining family composition, educational attainment, income and employment.
"Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics" was prepared by Jeffrey S. Passel, a veteran demographer and senior research associate at the Center, using a well-established methodology to analyze data from the March 2004 Current Population Survey, which was conducted by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The report estimates the number of persons living in families in which the head of the household or the spouse is an unauthorized migrant--13.9 million as of March 2004, including 4.7 million children. Of those individuals, some 3.2 million are US citizens by birth but are living in "mixed status" families in which some members are unauthorized, usually a parent, while others, usually children, are Americans by birthright.
"The large number of US citizen children born to parents with no legal status highlights one of the thorniest dilemmas in developing policies to deal with the unauthorized population," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research center based in Washington DC.
The report also offers extensive data on the employment of unauthorized migrants, mapping their presence in many sectors of the US labor force. The report finds that at least 6.3 million unauthorized workers were employed as of March 2004, comprising 4.3 percent of the civilian labor force. Since 1986 it has been illegal for employers to hire workers lacking proof of proper immigration status.
While 3 percent of unauthorized workers are employed in agriculture, 33 percent have jobs in service industries and substantial shares can be found in construction and extractive occupations (16%) and in production, installation and repair (17%).
Overall, unauthorized migrants are less educated than other sectors of the population with 49 percent having not completed high school, compared with 9 percent of the native-born and 25 percent of legal immigrants. Nonetheless, a quarter of the unauthorized have at least some college education and another quarter have finished high school.
"Not all of the unauthorized population fits the stereotype of a poorly educated manual laborer," Passel said.
The new report was developed as a briefing paper for the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America's Future, co-chaired by former Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN). The bipartisan task force has been convened by the Migration Policy Institute in partnership with the Manhattan Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The report on the unauthorized population was presented to the task force by the Pew Hispanic Center to provide a factual basis for its discussions; the Pew Hispanic Center, which does not engage in issue advocacy, is not participating in the task force's deliberations or its policy recommendations.
The report builds on a previous report by Passel released in March that estimated the unauthorized population at 10.3 million as of March 2004 and examined its dispersal to a variety of new destinations. Given recent growth rates the number of unauthorized migrants now approaches 11 million. The first section of the new report reviews those estimates, and the report then goes on to present additional material that examines the current characteristics of the undocumented population for the first time.
Some of the report's major findings include:
###
The Pew Hispanic Center is a nonpartisan research organization supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Its mission is to improve understanding of the U.S. Hispanic population and to chronicle Latinos' growing impact on the entire nation. The Center does not advocate for or take positions on policy issues. It is a project of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" in Washington, DC that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
yep all them jobs americans wont do.....FOR $5.15 AN HOUR THEY WONT
americans had no problem filling these jobs when they paid above minimum wage
Yep, 3% of illegal immigrants work in agriculture, but 100% of illegal immigrants are in the USA ILLEGALLY.
it never ceases to amaze me that some group of supposedly educated individuals can actually do a study of a group of undocumented, underground people and can still expect to lend credence to their results.
I would venture to say that more than that 3% have committed at least one felony since they ILLEGALLY entered the USA.
We will pay an extremely high price for ignoring this issue.
(Man, I'm either getting more cynical or wearing a foil hat!)
Here's a related thread:
Recent illegals 'smarter' than previous crossers - (higher % have HS, college degrees)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1423584/posts
IIRC, they had 57% of the illegal aliens tagged as Mexican, another 25% from Central America, then Asia, Africa, Europe...
The Report (PDF File) is pretty comprehensive with lots of graphs and statistics included.
more educated eh?
all the more reason to be legal....ignorance is no excuse
Pew Report ((PDF File)
The following specific occupation groups have both significant numbers and high concentrations of unauthorized migrants. For example more than 1 out of every 4 (or 27% of) drywall/ceiling tile installers in the U.S. is an unauthorized migrant. These occupations are grouped roughly by broad categories and generally share the characteristics noted earlier—no governmental licensing or education credentials are required.Drywall/ceiling tile installers 27% Cement masons & finishers 22% Roofers 21% Construction laborers 20% Painters, construction etc. 20% Brick/block/stone masons 19% Carpenters 12% Grounds maint. workers 26% Misc. agricultural workers 23% Graders & sorters, ag. prod. 22% Hand packers & packagers 22% Butchers/ meat, poultry wrkrs 25% Cooks 18% Food prep. workers 13% Dishwashers 24% Dining & cafeteria attendants 14% Janitors & bldg cleaners 12% Maids & housekeepers 22% Sewing machine operators 18% Cleaning/washing equip. oper 20% Metal/plastic workers, other 13% Packaging/filling mach. oper. 17%
MAKE NOTE: The 911 hijackers were more educated than we thought also. I agree with you--I don't care how smart or educated illegals are, they are ILLEGAL ALIENS and possible terrorists. Being smarter than we thought does not prevent them from being a terrorist.
Excerpt from Terrorists' Background Defy Conventional Wisdom
While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Sageman expanded on his research to include 162 terrorists and turned it into the groundbreaking book, "Understanding Terror Networks." He came across some compelling numbers:
About two-thirds of the terrorists went to college, in an area of the world where only about 10 percent of young men get a post-secondary education
About 87 percent came from generally secular backgrounds (most of the other 13 percent, who studied at the Muslim schools known as madrassas, were Indonesians)
Most came from middle or upper-middle class households
Oew fiddled with the data to create the impression of a "groundswell" for the preposterous CFR. They have no more credibility with me.
Should be PEW not Oew.
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