Gordon Hanson Quoted on Illegal Immigration in The Wall Street Journal
Number of Illegal Immigrants Holding Steady at 11 Million
02/01/2011
Miriam Jordan,
The Wall Street Journal
The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. stabilized at about 11 million last year after declining during the recession, according to a new estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center.
The nonpartisan research group reported that 11.2 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. in March 2010, compared with 11.1 million a year earlier.
"That suggests the number of new unauthorized immigrants entering the country is balanced by those leaving," said Pew demographer Jeffrey Passel, lead author of the study. There is no evidence that illegal immigrants are quitting the U.S. in growing numbers, he added.
Border enforcement pressured many immigrants already in the U.S. to stay put rather than return to their country of origin, even temporarily. "You don't go home, unless you aren't planning to come back," said Gordon Hanson, an immigration economist at the University of California, San Diego.
Even as it stabilizes, the size of the illegal population is still a third bigger than its level in 2000 of 8.4 million, and three times larger than in 1990, when it stood at 3.5 million.
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Gordon Hanson is the director of the Center on Pacific Economies and is a professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior research fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development.
