By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — The nation’s population of about 12 million undocumented immigrants has more intact families and stay-at-home moms, higher rates of poverty and lower percentages of people with health insurance than the population in general.

A demographic “Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants” released by the Pew Hispanic Center April 14 reported few dramatic changes in the characteristics of the population in the five years since Pew’s last such report. It noted that after growing rapidly between 1990 and 2006, the population of undocumented immigrants has stabilized, changing little since 2006.

Among the more striking differences reported, however, are a higher percentage of “mixed-status” families, where the children are U.S. citizens and one or both parents are in the country illegally.

Pew reported that 8.8 million people live in mixed-status families, consisting of 3.8 million undocumented immigrant adults and half a million children in the country without documents. The balance, 4.5 million, are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants.
Men ages 18-39 make up 35 percent of the undocumented immigrant population; many of them are single. But Pew estimates that 47 percent of undocumented immigrant households consist of couples with children, which compares to 35 percent of legal immigrant households and 21 percent of households of U.S. natives.

“Couples without children account for 15 percent of unauthorized immigrant households and 31 percent of both legal immigrant and U.S.-born households,” it said.

Since the last analysis, which used 2003 data from the Census Bureau, the number of U.S. citizen children with at least one undocumented parent increased from 2.7 million to 4 million.

More children with at least one parent who’s in the country illegally live in two-parent families, at 80 percent, compared to 71 percent of families where both parents are citizens, the report said. Eighty-four percent of children of legal immigrants live in two-parent families, it said.

The report also analyzed data about children of undocumented immigrants in the nation’s schools. While undocumented immigrants make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population, about 6.8 percent of the country’s schoolchildren have at least one parent who is undocumented. It said at least 10 percent of students in grades K-12 were in that category in five states — California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Nevada.

Also reflected in the report was that 21 percent of undocumented immigrant adults have incomes below the poverty rate, compared to 13 percent for legal immigrants and 10 percent for U.S.-born adults.

The poverty rate among children of unauthorized immigrants is even more dramatic, at one in three.

Undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 11 percent of people living below the poverty level, twice the rate of the total population, the report said.

The majority of adults without legal immigration status, 59 percent, had no health insurance in 2007, Pew reported. It said that is about double the rate of uninsured legal immigrants and four times the rate among adults born in the United States.

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