These three tables show detailed information about the overstay population residing in the United States in 2017. The tables augment the report on overstays released by CMS on April 24, 2019.
On June 15 2012, President Obama announced the establishment of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program opened a floodgate that allowed thousands of young Americans to pursue higher education, better job opportunities, and deepen their social ties in the country. DACA soon proved to be a program of national scope and importance with life-altering impact for its beneficiaries, their families and communities. This paper provides provides a demographic and social portrait of DACA recipients, which shows their deep level of integration and their extensive ties in US communities. For the report, CMS also interviewed several DACA recipients in the New York metro area on DACA’s impact in their lives and what its termination would entail.
This paper offers estimates and a profile of the 1.55 million US residents potentially eligible for a family-based immigration visa based on a qualifying relationship to a US citizen or lawful permanent resident (LPR) living in their household. It finds that this population – which is strongly correlated to the 3.7 million persons in family-based visa backlogs – has established long and strong roots in the United States, with US-born citizen children, mortgages, health insurance, and median income and labor force participation rates that exceed those of the overall US population. The paper offers several recommendations to reduce family-based backlogs. First, it calls for Congress to pass and the administration to implement legislation that provides a path to LPR status for persons in long-term backlogs. This legislation should: 1) define the spouses and minor unmarried children of LPRs as “immediate relatives” not subject to numerical limits, 2) not count the derivative family members of principal visa beneficiaries against per country and annual quotas, and 3) raise per country caps. The administration should also re-issue the visas of legal immigrants who emigrate each year, particularly those who formally abandon LPR status. Finally, Congress should also advance the cutoff date for the US registry program.
This essay by CMS Senior Fellow Robert Warren examines the number of nonimmigrants who overstayed their visas to the United States. It demonstrates that the number of visa overstays has not spiked, but has remained in the 200,000 to 400,000 range since 2000. Moreover, visa overstays leave the undocumented population at significant rates, including through emigration and adjustment to lawful permanent resident status. Of those who overstayed their non-immigrant visas in 2000, less than one-half were living in the United States as undocumented residents in 2017.
This paper finds that the US undocumented population from Mexico declined by 1.3 million people from 2010 to 2017, including a decrease of 400,000 from 2016 to 2017. For the first time ever, Mexican nationals constitute less than half of the total US undocumented population. The paper also finds that visa overstays contributed significantly more to the population of newly undocumented residents than illegal border crossers from 2010 to 2017. It recommends that the administration and Congress work together to: 1) provide more resources to the US Department of State for their visa-issuance work and 2) pass legislation to legalize the DREAM-Act eligible population, long-term Temporary Protected Status beneficiaries, and “intending immigrants” with US citizen or lawful permanent resident family members. These findings reveal a disconnect between public discourse on the border wall and empirical data, and argue for more nuanced and evidence-based responses to undocumented migration.
On October 10, 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued its long-anticipated proposed rule on inadmissibility on public charge grounds. Under the proposed rule, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers would consider receipt of cash benefits and, in a break from the past, non-cash medical, housing, and food benefits in making public charge determinations. This focuses on the potential effect of the proposed rule on two populations, undocumented immigrants and nonimmigrants that would otherwise be eligible for legal permanent resident (LPR) status based on a legally qualifying relationship to a US citizen or LPR living in their household. This CMS report analyzes how these populations in 2016 would have fared under the proposed rule. After placing the rule in historic context, the paper profiles these two populations and examines the characteristics that would mitigate in favor of and against their inadmissibility. The study offers a snapshot of these two groups based on estimates derived from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS).
