The number of immigrants living illegally in Georgia and across the nation has dipped only slightly in recent years as the U.S. boosted border security, struggled with high unemployment and watched economic conditions improve in Mexico, according to a new federal report.
In January 2012, there were 11.4 million immigrants living illegally in the U.S., down less than 1 percent — or 80,000 — from the year before, Homeland Security Department estimates show.
Released Friday, the estimates are based on subtracting government figures for immigrants living legally in the U.S. from census counts for all foreign-born residents.
Georgia was home to 400,000 immigrants without legal status in January 2012, the report says. That is down 40,000 from 2011, when the state enacted a sweeping law to crack down on illegal immigration.
It’s impossible to say precisely how that law has affected Georgia’s numbers. But demographers caution that the changes in Georgia’s figures are not statistically significant and such state-by-state estimates are subject to wide margins of error.
“As you get to smaller geographic areas — meaning going from the nation to states — the assumptions come into play more,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project who has authored similar reports.
Plus, several factors could be at play in Georgia’s numbers, including changing economic conditions on both sides of the southwest border and increased immigration enforcement in the U.S., said Passel and Robert Warren, who was head of the statistics division for the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.
“If there was a significant — even though not a large drop — in the unauthorized population (in Georgia), it probably has more to do with the inflow or outflow in terms of Mexico than changes because of some law,” said Warren, who co-authored a similar report last year. “The border is getting harder and harder to get across.”
House Republican Majority Whip Matt Ramsey of Peachtree City, who sponsored Georgia’s 2011 immigration enforcement law, agreed the economy and other factors affect illegal immigration.
“I’m confident we did everything that we can do to protect Georgia taxpayers from footing the bill for illegal immigration,” Ramsey said. “I certainly think it had an impact and I think the taxpayers are better served because of it. But ultimately the states can only do so much. Getting our arms around the problem is ultimately going to come down to the federal government addressing it in a comprehensive way.”
Georgia ranked seventh among states in the number of immigrants living illegally within its borders, the federal report shows. California ranks first at 2.8 million followed by Texas, 1.8 million; Florida, 730,000; New York, 580,000; Illinois, 540,000; and New Jersey, 430,000.
Most immigrants living illegally in the U.S. come from Mexico. Their numbers have dropped by 2 percent since 2010, from 6.8 million to 6.7 million, the report shows. Meanwhile, the number of Central American immigrants living in the U.S. without papers has increased slightly as their countries have struggled with violent crime.
The estimates come as immigration-overhaul legislation remains stalled in the Republican-led House. Last year, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed bipartisan legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the U.S. President Barack Obama has endorsed the bill. But House Republicans have refused to take it up, saying it would amount to amnesty for lawbreakers.
The government’s new estimates come close to those issued by Passel’s Pew Research Center in September. Using census records and other information, the nonpartisan research center estimated the number of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. grew by nearly 2 percent between 2011 and 2012, to 11.7 million.
But the center cautioned that the data it used is insufficient to definitively say whether there was an actual increase, while noting that its 2012 and 2009 estimates are statistically no different. The center is preparing to issue state-by-state estimates in the coming weeks, Passel said.
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