Nearly 100,000 Unauthorized Immigrants Graduate from High School Every Year

With the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program before the courts and renewed efforts in Congress to pass DREAM Act-type legislation, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) today released new estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants who graduate from high school, finding nearly 98,000 do so annually across the United States.

It has been more than 15 years since the last widely circulated estimate of graduating unauthorized immigrants was issued. Since then, the size and educational profile of the young unauthorized immigrant population, generally known as DREAMers, has changed considerably, Migration Policy Institute (MPI) researchers Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova explain in a new fact sheet. Among the changes: The growing diversity of the DREAMer population beyond Mexico as more come from Central America, Asia and Africa, and the advent of in-state tuition and other policies encouraging and supporting their high school graduation and higher education enrollment.

The new estimates draw from MPI’s unique methodology that permits analysis of sociodemographic characteristics of the unauthorized population by assigning legal status in Census Bureau data. Working from an initial dataset of unauthorized immigrants reaching high school graduation age, the researchers applied differences in overall U.S. graduation rates by race/ethnicity and English Learner status to generate the estimate of the number of DREAMers graduating annually.

Forty-four percent of these graduates reside in just two states: California and Texas, which account for about 27,000 and 17,000 of the 98,000 graduating every year. The researchers were able to provide estimates for 15 states that have the largest graduating DREAMer populations:

KJ