Pew Hispanic Center

Arizona's Population Growth Parallels America's

Demography of the State's Population and Labor Force, 2000-2006

January 24, 2008

Arizona is the first state in the nation to enact a law that penalizes businesses for knowingly hiring unauthorized immigrants. The Legal Arizona Workers Act took effect on Jan. 1, 2008.

In previous research, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that there were 400,000 to 450,000 unauthorized migrants living in Arizona in 2005. The Center estimates that 65% of this population participates in the labor force,¹ suggesting the presence of 260,000 to 292,500 unauthorized workers in Arizona in 2005. Based on these estimates, unauthorized migrants accounted for about 7% to 8% of Arizona's population and about 10% of its labor force.

This fact sheet presents a demographic profile of Arizona's Hispanic and foreign-born populations in 2006. It is based on the Pew Hispanic Center's analysis of the 2006 American Community Survey and the 2000 Decennial Census, both conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Hispanics accounted for 29.1% of Arizona's population in 2006, about double their share of the U.S. population (14.8%) that year. Arizona's residents also included 926,000 foreign-born persons in 2006. These immigrants comprised 15.0% of the state's population, slightly higher than the 12.5% share of immigrants in the U.S. population in 2006.

One notable aspect of Arizona's immigrant Hispanic population is that it is disproportionately of Mexican origin. Because migrants from Mexico are more likely than migrants from other countries to be unauthorized the large Mexican population boosts the share of undocumented workers in Arizona's labor force. In the United States, it is estimated that 4.9% of the labor force is undocumented.² As noted above, the estimated share of undocumented workers in Arizona's labor force is double the national share.

In several other respects, however, the demographic trends in Arizona with regard to immigration are similar to those in the nation as a whole. For example, the proportion of the Latino population in Arizona that is foreign born is similar to the proportion of Latinos nationally. And while the Hispanic native- and foreign-born populations grew at a faster pace in Arizona than in the nation from 2000 to 2006, so did the non-Hispanic population. Consequently, on a percentage basis, Hispanics have contributed no more to population growth in Arizona than they have to the growth of the U.S. population.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org.

The Pew Hispanic Center has also recently released two other fact sheets, providing a wealth of up-to-date information about America's fast growing immigrant populations.

The first of these, Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, 2006, focuses on the Latino population and includes the native-born as well as naturalized citizens and non-citizens. In addition to current distributions by such variables as income, education, occupation, marital status, fertility, Hispanic origin and homeownership, changes in these distributions in recent years are also provided.

A second set of fact sheets, Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States, 2006, provides similar data for the entire foreign-born population now living in the United States.

These two sets of fact sheets are based on the Center's tabulations of the Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey. The ACS is the largest household survey in the United States, with a sample of about 3 million addresses. It covers virtually the same topics as those in the long form of the decennial census. The ACS is designed to provide estimates of the size and characteristics of the U.S. resident population, which includes persons living in households and, for the first time, persons living in group quarters. The statistical portraits consist of 36 tables each on the social, economic and housing characteristics of the Hispanic and foreign-born populations. They also present estimates by state and, for the foreign born, by region of birth.

Notes

¹ Passel (2006) estimated that 7.2 million, or 65%, of 11.1 million unauthorized migrants in the United States participated in the labor force in 2005. It is assumed that the same percentage of Arizona's unauthorized migrant population participates in the labor force. For full report see The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S., March 7, 2006.

² Passel (2006).