The number of American citizen children who have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant has increased rapidly since 2003, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
About four million American children have at least one parent who lacks legal immigration status, the group found. And 73 percent of all children of illegal immigrants are American citizens. In 2003, 2.7 million American children had parents without legal status. The increase stems from the relatively young age of the immigrants, who have children soon after they settle in the United States, the report said.
Children of illegal immigrants are more than twice as likely to live with two parents than children of United States citizens, according to the report. In all, about 8.8 million people in the United States are in families that include parents who are illegal immigrants and children who are American citizens.
About three-quarters of the nation’s illegal immigrants are Hispanic.
The findings are likely to be another point of contention between advocates for immigrants and groups that favor more aggressive immigration enforcement.
In the last two years of the Bush administration, immigration authorities stepped up raids in factories and immigrant communities, and a record 349,000 immigrants were deported in 2008.
Civil rights and advocacy groups protested that the raids were dividing families and leading to de facto deportations of children with American citizenship who went to live in their parents’ home countries. Groups that advocate stricter enforcement say that illegal immigrants who have been deported have the choice of taking their American children with them or leaving them in the United States.
In the first months of the Obama administration, the raids have slowed to a near halt. After an operation by immigration agents in February at an engine plant in Bellingham, Wash., Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a review to produce a new enforcement strategy, which she said would focus primarily on abusive employers instead of immigrant workers.
The Pew report, by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, analyzed census data from March 2008. It is the first time in five years that Pew has closely examined family situations of illegal immigrants. It used a method for estimating the number of illegal immigrants that is widely accepted, including by government researchers and groups favoring reduced immigration.
In all, 5.5 million children living in the United States have parents who are illegal immigrants, an increase of 1.2 million children since 2003, the report found. Nearly 7 percent of students in public elementary and secondary schools are children of illegal immigrants, the report said.
About one-third of children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the 18 percent poverty rate for children of United States citizens, the report found. In 2007, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $36,000, substantially below the $50,000 median for citizens.
The report found signs that the rapid upward mobility long associated with new immigrants had stalled for the current generation of illegal immigrants.
“In contrast to other immigrants,” the report said, “undocumented immigrants do not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.”Source Here
