Gender and Migration
Reflecting broad changes in their social and economic status, women around the world have been migrating more in recent decades and as a result have constituted an increasing share of migrant populations almost everywhere.
Immigration 
Immigration is central to the growth and identity of the Hispanic population. Almost all of the Center's research, regardless of topic, includes separate tabulations of data for U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanics. Research on immigration focuses on the unauthorized population, overall trends in immigration and public attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policy.
Also see our statistical portraits, state and county databases, demographic profiles and Census 2010 tables for data on the characteristics of the Latino and foreign-born populations in the United States.
07.05.06
03.30.06
America’s Immigration Quandary
A growing number of Americans believe that immigrants are a burden to the country, taking jobs and housing and creating strains on the health care system. Many people also worry about the cultural impact of the expanding number of newcomers in the U.S.
03.07.06
Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.
Analysis of the March 2005 Current Population Survey shows that there were 11.1 million unauthorized migrants in the United States a year ago.
02.22.06
Pew Hispanic Center Survey of Mexicans Living in the U.S. on Absentee Voting in Mexican Elections
The study was conducted for Pew Hispanic Center via telephone by International Communications Research, an independent research company.
02.22.06
Pew Hispanic Center Survey of Mexicans Living in the U.S. on Absentee Voting in Mexican Elections
Strict requirements, insufficient information about registration procedures and lack of public interest hobbled Mexico’s first effort to conduct absentee voting among its more than ten million adult citizens living in the United States.
12.06.05
Survey of Mexican Migrants, Part Three
The vast majority of undocumented migrants from Mexico were gainfully employed before they left for the United States. Thus, failure to find work at home does not seem to be the primary reason that the estimated 6.3 million undocumented migrants from Mexico have come to the U.S.
11.01.05
The Higher Drop-Out Rate of Foreign-Born Teens
A report on high school enrollment points to the importance of schooling abroad in understanding the dropout problem for immigrant teens, finding that those teens have often fallen behind in their education before reaching the United States.
09.27.05
Rise, Peak and Decline: Trends in U.S. Immigration 1992 – 2004
The number of migrants coming to the United States each year, legally and illegally, grew very rapidly starting in the mid-1990s, hit a peak at the end of the decade, and then declined substantially after 2001.
08.16.05
Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy: Surveys among Latinos in the U.S. and in Mexico
A survey of U.S. Latinos shows that views are not unanimous on unauthorized migrants and U.S. policy toward them.
07.26.05
The New Latino South: The Context and Consequences of Rapid Population Growth
The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the South than anywhere else in the United States.
06.14.05
Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics
Most of the unauthorized population lives in families, a quarter has at least some college education and illegal workers can be found in many sectors of the US economy.
03.21.05
Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population
The undocumented population of the US now numbers nearly 11 million people, including more than 6 million Mexicans according to new estimates based on the most recent official data available.
03.14.05
Survey of Mexican Migrants, Part Two
The survey findings reveal whether the migrants would vote if they could and which segments of the migrant population are likely to meet key eligibility requirements.
03.02.05
Survey of Mexican Migrants
The Pew Hispanic Center conducted an unprecedented survey of Mexican migrants in the United States, including thousands who say they have no U.S.-issued identity documents.
03.02.05
Survey of Mexican Migrants, Part One
Most Mexican migrants want to remain in this country indefinitely but would participate in a temporary worker program that granted them legal status for a time and eventually required them to return to Mexico.
01.07.04
Immigration Data Excerpts
In light of President George W. Bush's January 7, 2004 announcement of a new immigration initiative, the Pew Hispanic Center provided information about attitudes towards immigrant and immigration policy, and estimates of the size of the undocumented population in the United States. Sources for the data are the National Survey of Latinos, conducted in 2002 jointly by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center's March 2002 report entitled “How Many Undocumented: The Numbers Behind the U.S.-Mexico Migration Talk.”
11.24.03
Remittance Senders And Receivers
Across the United States some six million immigrants from Latin America now send money to their families back home on a regular basis. The number of senders and the sums they dispatched grew even when the U.S. economy slowed, and looking to the future, the growth seems likely to continue and potentially to accelerate. The total remittance flow from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean could come close to $30 billion this year, making it by far the largest single remittance channel in the world.
10.14.03
The Rise Of The Second Generation
As it continues to grow, the composition of the Hispanic population is undergoing a fundamental change: Births in the United States are outpacing immigration as the key source of growth. Over the next twenty years this will produce an important shift in the makeup of the Hispanic population with second-generation Latinos–the U.S.-born children of immigrants– emerging as the largest component of that population. Given the very substantial differences in earnings, education, fluency in English, and attitudes between foreign-born and native-born Latinos, this shift has profound implications for many realms of public policy, and indeed for anyone seeking to understand the nature of demographic change in the United States.
12.17.02
Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation 2002 National Survey Of Latinos
The Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation 2002 National Survey of Latinos comprehensively explores the attitudes and experiences of Hispanics on a wide variety of topics. This survey was designed to capture the diversity of the Latino population by including almost 3,000 Hispanics from various backgrounds and groups so that in addition to describing Latinos overall, comparisons can be made among key Hispanic subgroups as well.
12.04.02
The Improving Educational Profile Of Latino Immigrants
It is a commonplace claim that the education level of the Latino immigrant population is continually falling behind that of the U.S.-born population. However, the Pew Hispanic Center finds that the educational profile of the adult population of foreign-born Latinos has improved significantly during the past three decades. These gains, however, have not yet produced a notable convergence with the level of education in the native-born U.S. population. During the period 1970 to 2000 the native-born population also experienced improvements of education that outpaced the progress among Latino immigrants. Nonetheless, the trends identified in this report suggest that the gap between immigrants and natives will narrow in the future.
10.03.02
Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation National Survey Of Latinos
The Hispanic electorate is emerging as a distinct presence on the political landscape, demonstrating broad but shallow party loyalty and a mixture of ideological beliefs and policy positions that defies easy categorization. At a time when the rest of the nation is almost evenly split along partisan lines, Latino voters appear to straddle some of the sharpest divides in American politics today. Though most Latinos identify with the Democratic Party, this party affiliation comes with a notable ambivalence, and on some social issues they express a conservatism that sets them apart from their white counterparts. Similarly, most Latino Republicans voice a preference for a bigger government and higher taxes, which is contrary to the stand taken by an overwhelming majority of white Republicans.
07.30.02
Latino Growth In Metropolitan America
The Latino population is rapidly evolving and that its demographic impact on the nation is changing quickly. Significant concentrations of Hispanics are no longer confined to a few regions such as Southern California or the Southwest, or only to a few cities like New York and Miami. Instead, in the coming years Hispanic population growth will most impact communities that had relatively few Latinos a decade ago.
05.09.02
Counting The “Other Hispanics”
This study reports on an alternative estimate of the breakdown of the Hispanic population according to national origin groups. Based on recently released Census Bureau data, the estimate reduces the “other” category by more than half. This estimate does not change the overall size of the Hispanic population, but it does offer a new calculation of how national groups are distributed within that population.
03.21.02
Guest Workers
This paper addresses three questions: (1) How many unauthorized workers are employed in U.S. agriculture? (2) How many unauthorized farm workers would be eligible for a legalization or guest worker program that required e.g. 60, 90 or 120 days of U.S. farm work during a qualifying 12-month base period? (3)How many guest workers would be admitted under the most likely legalization/guest worker programs; that is, what are likely exit rates from the farm work force for newly legalized workers? The concluding section discusses the implications of alternative scenarios for dealing with immigration and farm workers.
03.21.02
How Many Undocumented
There are more than 5 million unauthorized workers in the U.S. economy. This study estimates that these workers have become a very substantial presence in the sectors where they are concentrated. More than a million undocumented persons are employed in manufacturing and a similar number in the service industries. More than 600,000 work in construction and more than 700,000 in restaurants.
01.24.02
The Impact of the 2001/2002 Economic Recession on Hispanic Workers
Currently there are nearly 35 million Hispanics in the U.S., making them the second-largest ethnic group in the country. But the effect of the current recession on this important group is unknown. Yet, it is unlikely that all Hispanics have been similarly affected by the recession. Hispanics are a varied group not just in terms of national origin, but also in terms of time in the U.S., ranging from newly arrived immigrants to U.S.-born Hispanics. This report examines how three generations of Hispanics have fared in September and October 2001, compared to September 2000 and September 1999.
01.24.02
The Socioeconomic Status of Hispanic New Yorkers
This research report presents data showing the major demographic and socioeconomic changes in the Hispanic population of New York in the 1990s. It shows that despite gains in some areas, on average, Hispanics in New York were not significantly better-off in 2000 than in 1990. The household income per capita of Hispanic New Yorkers increased only slightly in the 1990s, compared to a much stronger expansion among White New Yorkers. By 2000, Hispanics displayed per-capita income of about one-third that of the non-Hispanic White population. The roots of the lack of change in Hispanic overall socioeconomic status in the 1990s lie, first, in the major demographic changes in the city, as reflected in an influx of relatively unskilled immigrants and an exodus of relatively skilled, high-income Hispanic New Yorkers; it also responds to the sluggish economic recovery of the city from one of its most severe recessions this century.
01.24.02
Estimates of Numbers of Unauthorized Migrants Residing In the United States
This brief report presents estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in mid-2001 for three separate groups: the total unauthorized population, the Mexican unauthorized population, and the non-Mexican Central American unauthorized population. The approach to estimation used is one set forth recently by Bean, et al (2001) that extends and amplifies work originally begun as part of the Mexico/U.S. Binational Migration Study (1997; Bean, et al. 1998). The specific features of the approach are described in detail in Bean, et al (2001). Basically, the method involves subtracting estimates of the numbers of persons residing in the country legally from the numbers of foreign born persons in official government surveys (which are known to contain both legal and unauthorized persons), and then adjusting for extra undercount of such persons in the surveys. The resulting figures give estimates of various unauthorized populations in the country.
Highlights