Who are the 11 million?

With the recent push by Senate lawmakers and the White House for immigration reform, one number is being tossed around a lot.  It has been estimated that there are about 11 million illegal residents in the United States.  Where does that number come from and who exactly are these people?

These questions were highlighted in a recent National Journal article by Brian Resnick, which describes the work of Pew Hispanic Center demographer Jeffrey Passel, whose estimates of the illegal immigrant population have become widely used in the media.  The illegal immigrant population cannot be directly measured by any of the major national surveys.  Unsurprisingly, response rates for voluntary, and even legally-required, surveys are particularly low for the illegal population.   Instead, Passel and the Pew Hispanic Center rely on a methodology that indirectly measures this group of people.  Here’s how it works:

Racial attitudes, the generation gap, and the political perfect storm

Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching closely the recent efforts by the National Journal to prominently showcase stories, polls, and news events that highlight demography and population change. With a particular focus on politics, the “Next America” project, beginning with the articles written by Editorial Director Ronald Brownstein, is an “unprecedented effort to explore the significant political, economic and social impact of profound racial and cultural changes.” I was grabbed by some of the findings from their latest article “Diversity Now.”

It is no surprise to anyone that the nation’s population is changing in a fundamental way. As a whole, the population is growing older, and this change is overlaying deep and enduring racial and ethnic divides in this country. The young are racially and ethnically diverse; the old are predominately white. In a few decades the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the United States will become “majority-minority.”  These fundamental changes will bring tremendous political challenges, as they have already begun to do. Perhaps not since the 1960s, when the boomers first entered the political scene en masse, will this country experience such generational conflict. Think of current political struggles over the national debt, old-age entitlement spending, or immigration and then imagine what the political debate around these issues will look like in a decade or two when more of today’s young people enter the political arena. The 2008 presidential race between Obama and McCain somewhat reflected this racial and generational gap. Obama, America’s first President of black descent, won with a minority of white voters while earning more than 80 percent of the support of non-whites; a strong majority of young people while declining support with older ages.