Thread: PEW:South Carolina Has Small Illegal Immigration Population

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Pew Center: South Carolina has small illegal immigrant population

Published Mon, Jun 20, 2005
By TIM DONNELLY
The Island Packet

South Carolina has one of the smaller illegal immigrant populations in the country, according to a new report released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The state is home to between 20,000 and 35,000 illegal immigrants in the state, much fewer than neighboring Georgia and North Carolina, according to the report. Georgia has between 200,000 and 250,000, while North Carolina has more than 300,000.

In terms of the percentage of population, illegal immigrants account for between 0.48 percent and 0.84 percent of people living in the Palmetto State.

The numbers in the study are imprecise because identifying who is an unauthorized immigrant can sometimes be difficult, said Jeffrey Passel, the author of the study.

The study is of particular importance to this area as the debate over the illegal immigrant population on and around Hilton Head Island continues.

Ebba Gamer, president of Citizens for a Better Community, a group that has tried to fight local businesses that hire illegal immigrants, recently said the group will be joining up with the Minuteman Project to broaden their fight in the Lowcountry. The group plans to use immigration lawyers and ex-government employees to flush out businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

Local officials have said they, too, are concerned about people who enter the country illegally and settle in the area. But they also said they realize that many local businesses depend on workers without legal status.

One of the biggest things the Pew study shows is that the majority of the unauthorized immigrants are in families and not young, single males, as people often think of them, Passel said. That means anti-illegal immigration groups may have to shift some of their strategies to reduce the illegal population.

"The majority of these people are in families, and a lot of these families have children," he said. "The kinds of incentives and the various ways that people try to structure things to get people to leave aren't likely to work."

The Pew Hispanic Center, part of the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, produced the study for a task force co-chaired by former Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. That task force is developing immigration reform programs for the Migration Policy Institute.

An estimated 10.3 million illegal immigrants lived in the country as of March 2004, the report states, 57 percent of them from Mexico. Since 1995, the flow of illegals into the country has outpaced the flow of legal immigrants by almost 100,000 people.

One of the other main findings of the study is that border states, such as California and Texas, are not the only ones with growing populations.The fastest-growing areas are now in the Southeast, Midwest and the mountain states, the study shows.

"The areas with the fastest rates of growth are outside what we might call the traditional areas where undocumented immigrants went," Passel said.

Passel also said he found that in South Carolina, the number of illegal immigrants grew rapidly between 1990 and 2000 but has leveled off since then. That information was not included in the final report.

Contact Tim Donnelly at 706-8145 or tdonnelly@islandpacket.com.

I wonder why SC has been so immune?

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

I wonder why SC has been so immune?

W

My guess would be that SC legislatures are less liberal in the laws they pass and expect the law to be enforced. If that is true, horay for them!

IT IS NOT ILLEGAL FOR THE LAWS OF THE LAND TO BE ENFORCED!