The proposed legalization of some 10 million illegal aliens has been debated as a national issue, as it should be, but the on-the-ground impact will vary tremendously from place to place within America.
To get estimates of the likely state-by-state distribution of those to be amnestied should S.744 become law I turned to an existing data set that, to my knowledge, has not been used for that purpose.
This is the state-by-state distribution of people applying for the president's regulation-created legalization program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). My sense is that the distribution of this subset of illegal aliens will be approximately the same as the much larger group of illegal aliens that would be legalized under S.744 (the handwork of the Senate's Gang of Eight) should that bill become law.
The DACA program, launched by the White House last year for aliens under the age of 31 who arrived before the age of 16, is now mature enough to have secured nearly half a million applications (497,960 by the end of April), and USCIS is generating monthly reports on where those applications were filed, state by state (with one odd exception I will get to later). The full set of the latest DACA application figures can be seen here.
Now, the roughly 10 million expected S.744 applicant total is about 20 times the size of the current DACA applicant pool, so — my reasoning goes — if there are 158 DACA applicants in South Dakota, as there are, there will be something like 3,160 S.744 applicants in that state, which I round to 3,000.
I decided that since the adverse impact of the legalization program will fall heaviest on unemployed legal residents of the country I would show both the projected number of legalized aliens and the current number of unemployed, state-by-state, as displayed in the table that follows.
| Projected Size of Amnesty Population and Current Number of Unemployed | ||
| (By states and territories. See text for definitions, sources, and methodology) | ||
| | ||
| States and Territories | Projected Amnesty Population under S.744 (CIS Estimate) |
April 2013 Unemployed (BLS Data) |
| Alabama | 50,000 | 151,000 |
| Alaska | 1,000 | 22,000 |
| Arizona | 352,000 | 240,000 |
| Arkansas | 67,000 | 95,000 |
| California | 2,827,000 | 1,672,000 |
| Colorado | 216,000 | 95,000 |
| Connecticut | 65,000 | 147,000 |
| Delaware | 18,000 | 32,000 |
| District of Columbia | 10,000 | 32,000 |
| Florida | 433,000 | 680,000 |
| Georgia | 324,000 | 395,000 |
| Hawaii | 4,000 | 32,000 |
| Idaho | 40,000 | 47,000 |
| Illinois | 535,000 | 611,000 |
| Indiana | 127,000 | 268,000 |
| Iowa | 36,000 | 78,000 |
| Kansas | 86,000 | 83,000 |
| Kentucky | 39,000 | 166,000 |
| Louisiana | 25,000 | 135,000 |
| Maine | 500 | 49,000 |
| Maryland | 130,000 | 206,000 |
| Massachusetts | 112,000 | 223,000 |
| Michigan | 78,000 | 391,000 |
| Minnesota | 78,000 | 159,000 |
| Mississippi | 19,000 | 121,000 |
| Missouri | 43,000 | 199,000 |
| Montana | 500 | 28,000 |
| Nebraska | 43,000 | 39,000 |
| Nevada | 160,000 | 133,000 |
| New Hampshire | 5,000 | 41,000 |
| New Jersey | 299,000 | 400,000 |
| New Mexico | 67,000 | 64,000 |
| New York | 548,000 | 749,000 |
| North Carolina | 354,000 | 419,000 |
| North Dakota | 500 | 13,000 |
| Ohio | 53,000 | 400,000 |
| Oklahoma | 82,000 | 89,000 |
| Oregon | 142,000 | 159,000 |
| Pennsylvania | 72,000 | 496,000 |
| Puerto Rico | 2,000 | 162,000 |
| Rhode Island | 16,000 | 49,000 |
| South Carolina | 82,000 | 174,000 |
| South Dakota | 3,000 | 19,000 |
| Tennessee | 102,000 | 250,000 |
| Texas | 1,622,000 | 816,000 |
| Utah | 117,000 | 64,000 |
| Vermont | USCIS issues no data on Vermont; perhaps included with “other”, below; perhaps there are no DACA applicants |
14,000 |
| Virginia | 164,000 | 220,000 |
| Virgin Islands | 1,000 | 6,000 |
| Washington state | 209,000 | 243,000 |
| West Virginia | 1,000 | 54,000 |
| Wisconsin | 90,000 | 217,000 |
| Wyoming | 7,000 | 15,000 |
| Other (the Marianas, Guam, and Vermont) | 1,000 | 10,000 (excludes the unemployed in Vt.) |
| Total | 9,807,000 | 11,672,000 |
Of course, if you have a law degree (the profession of many members of Congress) or a CPA or an MBA, such competition will be of no more than academic interest.
Unfortunately, the potential for newly legalized aliens both shouldering Americans out of jobs and lowering wages for many more, is all too rarely mentioned in the Congress.
Note: The USCIS data on DACA for the period ending April 30 cover 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. There is also an "other" category. Missing from the list is the state of Vermont, home of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee recently voted to send S.744 to the floor of the Senate.
Are there so few (or no) applications from the senator's state that it, alone, is left off the list?
The state was also missing from prior tabulations. My sense is that the USCIS "other" category for up-through-April data must include the handfuls of applications filed in Guam, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and in Vermont, for a cumulative total of 32.
The definition of the unemployed used in the table is the narrowest of the BLS definitions, leading to the smallest estimates of that all-too-large population. It includes people who had no work at all in the survey week, and who were actively looking for work. People with part-time jobs who want full-time work, and discouraged (but not retired) workers are not included in the definition. And there are millions and millions in those two categories. The BLS data can be seen here.
The DACA definition is for applications filed, not necessarily approved, but since more than 99 percent of the applications are approved, the two numbers are virtually identical. I used a 20 to one ratio to estimate the S.744 applications, and since the DACA total is a little less than half a million, the total estimated S.744 amnesty figure in the table is also a little less than 10 million.
(Note: An earlier version of this tabulation left out Mississippi and Rhode Island.)