• Census Bureau Data - the state's population history, present and future.
  
• Legal Immigrants - details on the over 212,000 post-1990 immigrants.
  
• Societal Issues (below)
  
• Refugee Settlement (below)
  
• Foreign Students (below)
  
• Illegal Immigrants (below)
  
• Local Immigration Reform Organizations (below)
  
• State Congressional Delegation Voting Record (below)

SOCIETAL ISSUES
A new study, The Changing Workforce: Immigrants and the New Economy in Massachusetts, has found that immigration is profoundly affecting the profile of the state's workforce. The report was compiled by Professor Andrew Sum of Northeast University's Center for Labor Market Studies under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), a local think-tank for economic issues. MassINC's report provides a host of statistics on the shift of the state's immigrant population to one that is low-skilled, poor, and ill-adapted to its economy and society.

Some of Professor Sum's findings include:

• The majority of working-age immigrants to Massachusetts have only a high school degree or less. And in 1990, 41 percent of immigrant family householders lacked high school diploma or equivalent.
  
• Nearly 33 percent of immigrant households in the commonwealth were female-headed with no spouse present.
  
• Roughly 23 percent of all Massachusetts immigrant families lived below the poverty line (three times the rate of natives).
  
• Immigrant families account for 36 percent of all poor families in the state even though they are only 14 percent of the households.
  
• Immigrant families are also growing poorer relative to native families. In 1989, the median income for immigrant families in Massachusetts was 70 percent of the median income for native families; by 1997, it had dropped to 60 percent.
  
• 40 percent of the children in immigrant families live in poverty (compared to 11 percent for natives).

In addition to these purely economic indicators, the report mentions anecdotal evidence of the increasing disunity in Massachusetts society.  These signs of demographic change appear in many forms and mediums:

• telephone company mailings that provide written communications and greetings in seven different languages;
  
• the appearance of a growing number of foreign language newspapers on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Brookline, and even Newton;
  
• ads on the subways for English as a Second Language training by private schools and the recruitment signs for vocational training programs in five different Asian languages;
  
• the growing number of public service announcements and caution signs in Spanish and English;
  
• the increasing number of ethnic-oriented grocery stores and restaurants; and
  
• the large number of foreign students attending colleges and universities in the state, particularly the Greater Boston area.

The Changing Workforce can be ordered from the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth at its website, www.massinc.org.

Refugee Settlement
Massachusetts has received 15,714 refugees over the most recent ten fiscal years (FY'97-'06) including 857 persons in FY’06

 

Under the Office of Refugee Resettlement's (HHS/ORR) assistance funding for FY'02 $1,535,711 is available for refugee employment training and other services programs in Massachusetts based on a three-year refugee settlement program covering 6,119 refugees (an average of $251 per refugee). This allocation does not include a larger share (55%) of funding programs for communities heavily affected by recent Cuban and Haitian entrants, communities with refugees whose cultural differences make assimilation especially difficult, communities impacted by federal welfare reform changes, educational support to schools with significant refugee students, and discretionary grants. ORR grants for FY’05 and FY’06 respectively were $6,672,112 and $7,212,693

LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENCY STUDENTS
Data are not available nationally on immigrant students (either legally or illegally resident in the United States) who are enrolled in primary and secondary schools (K-12). However, many of these students are enrolled in Limited English Proficiency/English Language Learning (LEP/ELL) instruction programs. Many may be U.S.-born, but the majority of these students may be assumed to be either immigrants or the children of immigrants, with the exception being areas with native Americans who speak a native language other than English.

In Massachusetts, overall enrollment in 2002 (979,593) was 0.5 percent above enrollment in 1993. By contrast, LEP enrollment (46,078 - 4.7% of all enrollment) was 1.5 percent higher than a decade earlier.

Data on enrollment in LEP/ELL programs are collected by the federal government from school systems that receive Title VII funds for these special instruction programs. The data on LEP/ELL enrollment are understated because data from private schools that do not apply for Title VII assistance are sketchy.

FOREIGN STUDENTS
The 2006/07 annual report of the Institute of International Education (IIE) lists the number of foreign students attending post-secondary school in Massachusetts as 28,680. Six schools in Massachusetts are listed as having a major concentration of these students:

• Harvard University had enrollment of 4,514 foreign students, 22.5% of total enrollment.
• Boston University had enrollment of 4,484 foreign students, 14.2% of total enrollment.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology had enrollment of 3,042 foreign students, 27.6% of total enrollment.
• Northeastern University had enrollment of 2,223 foreign students, 9.5% of total enrollment.
• University of Massachusetts Amherst had enrollment of 1,739 foreign students, 6.9% of total enrollment.
• University of Massachusetts Boston had enrollment of 2,061 foreign students, 16.7% of total enrollment.

Below, a chart illustrates the sharp increase of foreign students attending school in Massachusetts from 1960-2000.  

For information on foreign student issues see: Foreign Students in the United States.

ILLEGAL ALIENS

FAIR Estimate - FAIR’s estimate of the state’s illegal alien population as of 2007 is about 250,000 persons. This is part of an overall estimate of the U.S. illegal alien population of about 13 million persons.

INS/DHS Estimate - The INS (now dissolved into the Dept. of Homeland Security) estimated in February 2003 that the resident illegal population in Massachusettes was 87,000 as of January 2000. This number actually 2,000 higher than the INS' 1996 estimate.

Other Estimates - The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the illegal alien population of the state at 150,000 to 250,000 as of 2005.

COSTS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS
Incarceration Costs - Massachusetts has received partial compensation under the federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) that was established in 1994 to compensate the states and local jurisdictions for incarceration of "undocumented," aliens who are serving time for a felony conviction or at least two misdemeanors.

The recent SCAAP amounts that Massachusetts has received were:

The amount of SCAAP awards has been declining in both total distributions and even more as a share of the state’s expenses. In FY’99 the state received 38.6% of its costs for 2,154 prisoner years of detention. By FY’02, the state’s reported illegal alien detention decreased by 33 percent to 1,453 prisoner years, while compensation decreased by 49 percent, and then fell sharply.

Medical Costs - Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, hospitals with emergency rooms are required to treat and stabilize patients with emergency medical needs regardless whether or not they are in the country legally or whether they are able to pay for the treatment. Congress in 2003 enacted an appropriation of $250 million per year (for 4 years) to help offset some of the costs due to use of this service by illegal aliens. This amount has been allocated among the states based upon estimates of the illegal alien population and data on the apprehension of illegal aliens in each state. This amount compensates only a fraction of the medical outlays. For Massachusetts, the proposed payment in fiscal year 2004 is $2,074,682.

Educational Costs - In our study Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration is Sending Schools into the Red, we estimated based on 2004 data that educational expenditures for illegal immigration were costing the Massachusetts taxpayer $494.4 million dollars annually. This cost was partially for educating students who were themselves illegally in the country ($206 million) and in part for the education of their siblings born in the United States to illegal residents ($288.5 million).

Projected Fiscal Costs - In 2006 we estimated that Massachusetts taxpayers are currently burdened with annual costs of about $580 million because of illegal aliens residing in the state. That estimate was based on only expenditures for education, emergency medical care and incarceration. We projected that those costs will rise unless we gain control over our borders and our worksites. If a new amnesty and increases in immigrants and guest workers were enacted, as proposed by business and ethnic advocacy groups, we project that the cost to the state’s taxpayers for those same programs would rise to $992 million per year in 2010 and to $1.737 billion per year in 2020.

LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS
You can view a listing of local immigration reform organizations here.

STATE CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION VOTING RECORD
You can view the voting record of your representatives in Congress regarding immigration issues in our voting report section.

Revised January 08