A fascinating analysis from Pew Research shows most of the United States’ 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants live in just 20 major metropolitan areas. This is 6 in 10 of the total unauthorized immigrants in the US. But this is also where most of the legitimate immigrants lived, underlining the fact that illegal immigrants prefer to live in the areas populated by immigrants in general.
As expected large metropolitan cities are home unauthorized immigrants with cities like New York, Los Angeles and Houston topping the list. New York and Los Angeles metro areas had 1.2 million and 1 million unauthorized immigrants, respectively, with no other city crossing a million. Among the top 20 areas, the smallest unauthorized immigrant populations included Orlando (110,000) and Austin (100,000).
Below is an ineractive version of the map
The research, which is based on US Census Bureau results, shows of these places, there were 20 metropolitan areas with 6.8 unauthorized immigrants in 2014, which is 61% of the total. By contrast, only 36% of the total U.S. population lived in those metro areas, while 65% of lawful immigrants, including naturalized citizens and noncitizens, lived in those metros.
Not all Democrats
Interestingly, a Washington Post analysis of the research shows that not all illegal immigrant areas are typically Democrat support bases.
The above map, which has been overlaid with the 2016 electorate data, shows plenty of red areas that one would expect, especially the House districts at the center of the metro areas.
When taken as a percentage of total population, however, the picture changes since there are isolated pockets that have a disproportionately large percentage of the total population that are illegal immigrants, thus establishing the correlation between US politics, especially President Donald Trump anti-immigrant rhetorics.
Another noticeable place is Texas, which backed Trump to the hilt, since his election promises of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold. But now but many of them, who work in farms, are at an increased risk of deportation.
California has five of the 20 metros with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations are in — Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose, while Texas has three– Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin. All these areas will be affected by President Trump’s promise to take action against places that do not cooperate with federal officials in identifying illegal immigrants. Even though the President’s Executive Order threatens to cut federal funds to these “sanctuary jurisdictions,” several of the big city mayors have refused to comply with it.
The data further reveals
The Pew Research uses the data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, using the same residual method as its previous reports on unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrants include people who either crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas.
Illegal immigrants — who account for every one in four foreign-born US residents — constituted around 3.5% of the total population in 2014. In areas like Houston (37%), Dallas (37%), Atlanta (33%), Phoenix (37%), Las Vegas (35%), Denver (37%) and Austin (34%) metro areas they make up a somewhat higher share of immigrants, while in New York (19%), Miami (18%), San Francisco (17%) and San Jose (17%) metro areas, the share of illegal immigrants was lower than the total.
