This September 2006 memo details the Census Bureau’s attempts to better estimate the number of “foreign born” U.S. residents and classify them according to legal status, e.g., “legal,” “temporary,” “unauthorized migrants,” and “quasi-legal migrants.” The goal, according to the memo, is to provide annual estimates of the foreign-born population on a national level. That type of information would be useful on multiple levels, among them policy discussions in Congress involving immigration reform and law enforcement strategies to deal with undocumented workers.
The problem that immediately arises, however, is definition of terms, in particular “quasi-legal migrants” who may have pending applications for legal U.S. residency even though their current status is illegal. That’s problematic from a statistical standpoint, of course, and it creates the further difficulty of explaining such distinctions to U.S. citizens, who may not understand or appreciate the multifaceted nature of immigration to this country and the legal status of those who come here.
In fact, the document states that “there are legitimate reasons for interpreting the immigration status of the resident foreign-born population in multiple ways. For example, an agency may need to render a legal classification for an enforcement, budget, or program purpose, while policymakers may want to estimate how many foreign-born residents may qualify for or be affected by proposed legislation. Thus, there may be no single, uniquely correct way to estimate numbers of foreign-born residents with pending applications by immigration status.”
That probably wouldn’t set well in Congress, where folks on both sides of the immigration debate want hard numbers and want them yesterday. The person who submitted the article suggests it was deemed “too sensitive.” That’s probably correct, but the memo also outlines serious difficulties with attempting to gather and analyze such data.
Whether from a political or statistical standpoint, it’s not always easy to define who’s here legally and who’s not, although the Census Bureau came up with a “conceptual exercise” of four categories and three subcategories to do just that. Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve the problem of doing the counting: “Few, if any, data sources literally correspond to these categories … This lack of sufficient data is one of the greatest difficulties in estimating the foreign-born population by legal status.”