The face of unauthorised immigration in the US today (april 2006) (A paper for Catholic Social Thought)

(Unauthorised is a synonymn for illegal or undocumented)

I researched[1] the profiles of unauthorized immigrants and decided to normalize the numbers to the size of a class of 30 as proxy unauthorized immigrants.

If we represented the unauthorized immigrants in the US today, then there would be 24 additional class rooms that help comprise the face of America. A year ago there would have been two people less in this classroom. 20 of us would have been here for less than 10 years, 12 for less than 5. Aside from us, there are two other classrooms full of foreign-born Americans, one has 31 naturalized citizens, and the other has 28 permanent residents. 17 of us would have come from Mexico, 7 of us from Central and South America, (most of those from Central America), 4 of us from Asia, two of us from Europe, and one of us from Africa (or elsewhere).

Between 2000-2005, four Mexicans, one Asian and one Central American would have come here. 15 of us would be adult males, 10 adult females, and five of us would be children. 8 of our (the people in this room) children would be in another room, because they are American citizens by birth.

20 of us would be workers. 1 in Farming and related fields, 2 in Transportation and Material Moving, 2 in Sales and Administrative support, 2 in Management, Business and Professional areas, 3 in Production, Installation and Repair, 4 in Construction and Extractive, and 6 in Service Occupations. Aside from those jobs taken by unauthorized immigrants, there are only three other farming jobs, about 29 other service jobs, 25 other construction jobs, 30 other production jobs and 26 other transportation jobs (a disproportionate amount of immigrants are in these fields). And in total, aside from unauthorized workers, there are 388 other jobs, or 13 other classrooms.

This should give you all a better idea of what the face of unauthorized immigrants looks like, and how they relate to our economic structure.

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[1] http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html