Illegal immigrants may number as high as 20 million and they are gaining a larger share of the job market

Angie Wagner:

More and more, they are spreading beyond traditional immigrant states like California and Texas. They are spreading through the West and South, where there is tremendous growth, affordable housing and family networks. They are increasingly found in states like Utah, Washington, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia and the Dakotas. And they're heading to suburbia.

This is America's underground economy, and it generates billions of dollars worth of labor each year. Illegal workers come for the jobs, and always find companies eager to hire them.

"The toleration of illegal immigration undermines all of our labor," said Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University labor economics professor.

"It rips at the social fabric. It's a race to the bottom. The one who plays by the rules is penalized. It becomes a system that feeds on itself. It just goes on and on and on."

For years, the immigrant population mainly stuck to six destination states -- California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey. But in the past five years, the most rapid growth has taken place in states once of little interest to immigrants -- Tennessee, Mississippi, the Dakotas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said Bill Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

They are following rapid growth, going where the jobs are and where the cost of living is low. Suburbs now attract more new immigrants than cities.

In the West, the immigrant population in the Mountain states is growing faster than the rest of the region. In the South, the interior Southeast has higher immigrant growth than the more glamorous coastal states, Frey said.

The way Bob Justich sees it, America is hooked on cheap, illegal workers. As a senior managing director for Bear Stearns, he has spent the last two years meeting with immigrants, business owners, police and real estate agents to determine the size of the underground economy and its effect on the real economy.

This he knows for sure: There are way more illegal immigrants in the country than the government estimates. The government puts the number at around 8.5 million; Justich says it is more than double that -- closer to 20 million, mainly because illegal immigrants don't bother to respond to Census Bureau forms.

"If everybody was deported tomorrow, it would be like emptying the equivalent of New York state," he said. "And this source of labor has become vital to many businesses."

Illegal immigrants hold about 12 million to 15 million jobs in the United States, or about 8 percent, according to Justich. That may seem a small percentage, but the pressure of its presence helps keep wages for unskilled jobs low. And many of the jobs are off the books, meaning the government may be foregoing $35 billion a year in income tax collections, he said.

Illegals hurt Americans

Shut Our Border To Illegal Aliens