Pew Hispanic Center

The Complex Tapestry of the Undocumented

Day Laborers Are Just One Strand

by Gabriel Escobar
March 28, 2006

They are on Long Island, in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, in Atlanta and in Southern California. You can find them in the parking lots outside Home Depot in Florida and in Phoenix. Wherever they are, they will likely have four things in common. They are Latino. They are men. They are looking for work. And they are all "day laborers."

In communities grappling with this ad-hoc labor force, the term "day laborer" has become shorthand for illegal immigrant. But as ubiquitous as they are in the public debate over immigration, day laborers are only a fraction of a growing and diverse population of unauthorized migrants.

Who are the unauthorized, and how many are there? They number between 11.5 and 12 million, according to the latest Pew Hispanic Center estimate. More than three quarters (78%) migrated here from Mexico or some other Latin American country.

But beyond this prototypically Hispanic origin, the other demographic traits commonly associated with the image of the day laborer are not good descriptors of the full undocumented population.

For starters, men make up only about half (49%) of the unauthorized population, with women (35%) and children (16%) comprising the rest. In addition, most unauthorized immigrants are not single. More than half of this population is made up of men and women who live in families with spouses and/or children.

And once the children come into the picture, the family portrait of unauthorized immigrants grows more complex. According to Pew estimates, some 1.8 million children of unauthorized immigrants were born abroad and thus, like at least one parent, are here without legal status. But an even greater number, 3.1 million, were born in this country and thus under U.S. law are citizens by birth (even though their parents may not be).

If one adds this population of 3.1 million U.S. citizen children into the mix, the total number of people who live in families in which either the head of the family or a spouse is unauthorized grows to 14.6 million.

Many of these families are "mixed" -- that is, they include some members who are here without legal authorization and others who are U.S. citizens by birth. According to the Center's analysis, there are 1.5 million unauthorized families in which all the children were born in the United States and are thereby legal residents. Another 460,000 families have a mix of children -- some of whom are legal residents and others who are unauthorized. And this family portrait also includes 3.9 million adult women, more than half of whom work.

Finally, to return to the employment profile of unauthorized immigrants, here, too, the "day laborer" stereotype creates a distorted impression. There are an estimated 7.2 million unauthorized workers in the labor force, but just a fraction -- typically the most recently arrived -- are day laborers.

The vast majority of those 7.2 million unauthorized immigrant workers hold jobs -- on farms, on construction sites, in food processing plants and textile mills, in the leisure and hospitality industries, in landscaping and janitorial services and elsewhere. Many are unskilled, but many others are upholsterers, industrial sewing machine operators, roofers, meat packers and the like.

Indeed, some 5% of all the jobs in the U.S. civilian in labor force are held by unauthorized immigrants, according to a Center estimate based on data from the March 2005 Current Population Survey.

So when one considers the totality of the unauthorized population -- the mothers, the children, the U.S. citizens who are linked by blood to those who are not, the skilled and unskilled workers who hold one of every 20 jobs in this country -- the day laborer is just one strand in a complex tapestry.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org

Notes

¹This report uses the term "unauthorized migrant" to mean a person who resides in the U.S. but is not a U.S. citizen, has not been admitted for permanent residence, and is not in a set of specific authorized temporary statuses permitting longer-term residence and work. Some migrants in this group have legal authorization to live and work in the U.S. on a temporary basis, including those with temporary protected status (TPS) and some migrants with unresolved asylum claims. Together they may account for as much as 10% of the estimate.