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Most illegal immigrants' kids are US citizens

By Emily Bazar | USA Today

Officers of the US Border Patrol check for illegal immigrants in a side road in the Santa Maria area beside the Rio Grande river in Halinger, Texas, on 15 December 2008. According to official data, illegal immigration from Mexico has substantially dropped so far this year.File photo/AFP/Getty Images/Jose Cabezas/US

Nearly three-quarters of illegal immigrants’ children were born in the USA and are citizens, according to a report released Tuesday.

Those 4 million children muddy the immigration debate, raising questions about enforcement and public services for illegal immigrant families whose members include legal residents, experts say.

“Undocumented immigrants live in neighbourhoods; they have kids in school,” says Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Hispanic Centre and co-author of the report. “That complicates greatly the difficulty of the task of coming up with policies to deal with this population.”

About one-third of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the USA are women, and most illegal immigrants are married or living with someone, the non-partisan research centre’s analysis of 2008 Census data shows.

Of the 5.5 million children of illegal immigrants, 73% were born here. In 2003, 63% of illegal immigrants’ children were citizens.

Because more families are made up of both legal and illegal residents, immigration enforcement becomes trickier, says Steven Camarota, research director at the Centre for Immigration Studies. The centre advocates reduced immigration. “Once kids are involved, it gets tougher to enforce the law,” Camarota says. “It complicates it as a political and emotional matter.”

Although Camarota says there should be room for exceptions, “the presence of a US-born child should not be used as an excuse not to enforce the law.”

Douglas Massey, a sociology professor at Princeton University, favours changes in immigration law that would allow illegal immigrants to stay legally.

That way, Massey says, the taxes paid by newly legalised residents could be used to fund public services they use, such as education and health care.

According to the report, children of illegal immigrants make up 6.8% of children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade.

“We don’t really have an option other than somehow bringing these people above board,” Massey says.

The report also shows that illegal immigrants are more likely to live as family units with their children than legal immigrants or US-born Americans.

Nearly half of illegal-immigrant households are couples living with children, compared with 35% of legal-immigrant households and 21% of US-born households.

Passel attributes that disparity to the relative youthfulness of illegal immigrants.

“It’s a very young population, with a large concentration under 40,” he says.

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