Immigrant Tally Doubles in Census

As the U.S. economy of the 1990s grew from sour to sizzling hot, economists kept scratching their heads over several big questions. How were companies finding enough new employees to keep business booming? And if companies were fighting for workers, how come Americans were not getting big pay raises?

Now, some analysts say the 2000 census offers an answer: Illegal immigrants were pouring into the country far faster than anyone knew, filling the nation’s hunger for workers and keeping wages in check.

New data suggest that the United States has nearly twice the number of undocumented immigrants than officials thought--possibly 11 million or more, compared with earlier estimates of 6 million. If so, then about 1 in 25 U.S. residents is an illegal immigrant.

About 40% of illegal immigrants live in California, far more than in any other state.

The Census Bureau itself acknowledges that it may have underestimated--by 100%--the number of people who came to the country illegally in the last decade. Although the exact size of the undercount is unclear, “we’ve had a major change in immigration, no matter what,” said John Long, chief of the Census Bureau’s population division. “It’s either been a large change in our immigration or a phenomenal change.”

The discovery helps explain why local governments, schools and hospitals were so ill-prepared for the huge demand for services in recent years, particularly in big immigration states.

“We’ve been putting up portable [classroom] after portable after portable, and we’re still not keeping up,” said school board member Harald Martin of the Anaheim Union High School District.

The new estimates also show that the government crackdown on illegal immigration has been much less successful than believed. And they provide a new glimpse of the fierce struggle for a livelihood being waged at the lower end of the economic scale.

“If you ask where’s the group in society that was beaten up the most, the answer is high school dropout males,” said Paul Harrington, a population expert at Northeastern University in Boston. “They’ve had huge earning drops. And yet this is the part of the market we’re flooding with foreign-born workers.” He called the development “very disturbing.”

Other analysts say the larger flood of workers is good news for the U.S. economy, helping businesses expand and keep up with the demand for goods and services.

“It looks like 5 million illegal immigrants were here that we didn’t know about--maybe more--and it wasn’t the end of the world,” said Everett M. Ehrlich, undersecretary for economic affairs at the Commerce Department in President Clinton’s first term.

“And what if we didn’t have them? How could we have gotten by without them? Look at how they increased our productive potential.”

Analysts arrived at their conclusions on immigration through different routes, but they all started with figures released over the last three months that provided the first peek at census 2000.

As of mid-1999, officials had been expecting to find about 275 million Americans. However, census workers actually counted 281.4 million. And when Census Bureau statisticians sought to adjust the count to try to account for people that the census missed, the number rose to 285 million.

“The population increased more than we expected it to. The question is, how did that happen?” said Long, the census official. The bureau knows how to correct for people who might have been double-counted, “and it’s not likely that we missed births or deaths, because those are very well registered” by local governments. “So the problem would be somewhere in the immigration numbers.”

To help account for the difference in the numbers, Census Bureau tabulators have suggested nearly doubling their estimate of illegal immigrants who arrived during the decade from 2.8 million to 5.5 million.

But Harrington, using his own formula to capture the undercount, thinks the census missed as many as 7 million undocumented immigrants, which he termed a “conservative” figure. By his accounting, illegal immigrants in the United States total 13 million, or 4.6% of the population.

To arrive at their number, Harrington, Andrew M. Sum and colleagues at Northeastern University turned to a mystery that has dogged economists throughout the decade. Each month, the government surveys the public to find out how many people are working. It also ask businesses how many people they employ.

The two numbers should come close to matching, but they grew further and further apart during the 1990s. Businesses said they created nearly 23 million jobs from 1992 to 2000--and they have no incentive to overstate the number because they must pay taxes on each worker.

But the worker survey turned up only 16.7 million new jobs, a significant difference. Economists and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suspected that the worker survey was flawed because it included an assumption of the total population that was too low.

The Census Bureau will release more data in the coming year that should further illuminate the hidden population of illegal immigrants. The data will shed light on what nations they came from and how many took high-wage, high-tech jobs rather than low-wage jobs.

With the economy now weakening, some analysts wonder whether the larger illegal population will mean greater hardship for all in the low-wage work force.

Martin, the Anaheim school official, said companies might lay off citizens before lower-wage illegal workers to save on salaries and unemployment taxes. That could raise tensions between the two groups. Harrington said some surveys show that employers believe immigrants have a stronger work ethic than young male citizens on the low end of the wage scale.

But on the whole, illegal workers are bound to feel the most pain in a downturn, Harrington said, because they have no bargaining power. Indeed, the AFL-CIO argues that illegal immigrants should not be deported but given amnesty and allowed to team up with citizens in labor unions.

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that favors lower immigration levels, rejected the idea that immigration law is unenforceable. “We know how to reduce illegal immigration--by border enforcement and enforcing the ban on hiring illegals--but we’re unwilling to do it,” he said.

“We want to like immigration because it’s part of what America has been and still is about, but we are also uncomfortable with the consequences--the fiscal impact of importing people into a welfare state and the impact it has on blue-collar Americans at the bottom of the job ladder. We are ambivalent.”

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Times staff writer Jennifer Dorroh contributed to this story.

* IMMIGRANT AID

California is opening an Office of Immigrant Assistance to combat fraud. B1