About one of every 20 residents in San Diego County is an unauthorized immigrant, according to a report by the Pew Research Center released Thursday.

About 170,000 unauthorized immigrants live in the San Diego region, 13th among the 20 metropolitan areas with the largest populations who are in the country illegally.


San Diego is tied with San Francisco at 11th in percentage of unauthorized residents as part of total population, data from the study shows. San Diego County’s population is about 3.2 million.

The report, like past studies, shows that some regions have a disproportionate share of the people living in the United States illegally. The 20 areas researchers considered are home to 36 percent of people living in the country, but 61 percent of unauthorized immigrants. These regions are even more popular with legal immigrants. Among that demographic, these regions account for 65 percent of people living in the United States but were born in another country.

Unauthorized immigrants choose their new home largely by where they can get a job and where they know people, as have immigrants historically have through U.S. history, said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at Pew who co-wrote the study.

“You start from the idea that these people are basically coming here to work, so they are going to where they can find jobs,” he said in an interview. “And secondarily, they tend to go where they know people and where they have families. That’s why some of these patterns are so longstanding. But the major factor is where there are jobs.”


Over the last 20 years or so, unauthorized immigrants have dispersed from major entry cities like New York and Los Angeles to other parts of the country, Passel said. They have a much smaller share of the unauthorized immigration population as 20 to 25 years ago.

“People left those states in the 90’s and created new communities in Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Midwest, and the Southeast,” he said.

The report shows that 3.5 percent of all U.S. residents are unauthorized immigrants, and one quarter of all immigrants are in the country illegally. Twenty-two percent of all immigrants in San Diego County are unauthorized.

The numbers in the report show the potential implications of a campaign pledge and an executive orders by President Donald Trump that aims to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally. Among other things, Trump has also pledge to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities, where authorities do not cooperate with immigration enforcement agencies.


By far, the New York metropolitan area and the Los Angeles-Orange counties region have the largest share of the country’s estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants, with each having about 10 percent of all people in the country without permission. They were also the only regions with about 1 million unauthorized immigrants. New York had slightly more in raw numbers than the L.A.-area. Houston, which was third, was well behind with an estimated 575,000.

Five of the 20 areas with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations are in California, and include the Riverside-San Bernardino region, San Francisco, and San Jose.

Of the 20 areas, only San Diego and Riverside-San Bernardino were within 100 miles of the United States’ border with Mexico.

Pew used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2014. In nine cases statistics were only available for regions rather than populations within a city’s boundaries.That’s why the Census Bureau identified San Diego-Carlsbad as the region for the county.


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Twitter: @jptstewart

joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com


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