Pawlenty defends immigrant report

12/24/2005

Expert stands behind estimate, but state demographer says numbers may be high

BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press

How many illegal immigrants are there in Minnesota?

A report issued by Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s administration this month put the number at 80,000 to 85,000. And the report used the higher number in calculating some of the costs to the state.

Questions about those estimates prompted Pawlenty to defend the number Friday on his weekly radio show.

Criticizing a story in the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, the Republican governor said the immigration expert who provided the number — Jeffrey S. Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C. — confirmed that was his best estimate.

But state demographer Tom Gillaspy, who did not see the report until it was released publicly Dec. 8, said the 85,000 figure seemed high. He said a member of his staff was asked about the number while the report was being prepared and advised the governor’s staff that the number probably overestimated Minnesota’s illegal immigrant population.

“We were asked a question: Do these numbers seem high?” Gillaspy said. “Yes, they seem high.”

But Gillaspy declined to make his own estimate of the illegal immigrant population, and he said he respected Passel’s work. “We’re not talking about something that’s wildly off the deep end,” he said of the 85,000-person estimate.

In June, the Pew Hispanic Center published a paper by Passel titled “Unauthorized Immigrants: Numbers and Characteristics” that estimated ranges of population for states across the country.

The paper identified groupings of states with estimated ranges of illegal immigrant populations. California, Texas, Arizona and four other states were estimated to each have 300,000 to 2.3 million people in that category. Wisconsin was in a group of seven states estimated to have 100,000 to 150,000 illegal immigrants.

And Minnesota was one of nine states with estimated populations between 55,000 and 85,000 illegal immigrants.
This fall, Michael Muilenburg, the lead researcher on the Pawlenty administration report, called Passel and asked him to provide a specific number within the range for Minnesota. Passel responded by estimating Minnesota’s illegal immigrant population at 85,000.

“They asked if I could give them my best estimate, and that’s it,” Passel told the Pioneer Press in an interview. He said he had no quarrel with the Minnesota report’s use of his estimate.

Gillaspy said he would have preferred to estimate Minnesota’s illegal immigrant population as a range, such as the 55,000 to 85,000 estimate that Passel used in his paper. “I personally would not have put a point estimate on a number like that because there is a big range of uncertainty,” he said.

Passel stressed that his estimate of 85,000 illegal immigrants was just that, an estimate.

“In the grand scheme of things, the 50,000 and the 80,000 are roughly the same,” he said.

Gillaspy has never made a formal estimate of how many illegal immigrants live in Minnesota. Before Passel’s estimate, the federal Department of Homeland Security estimated in a 2003 report that Minnesota had an illegal immigrant population of about 60,000 in 2000, a nearly fivefold increase in a decade. That number was based on a national U.S. Census Bureau survey.

Gillaspy said factors peculiar to Minnesota — such as the state’s big legal refugee population and heavy in-migration from other states in the 1990s — led him to conclude that 60,000 was probably the upper limit of the likely range of illegal immigrants in the state in 2000. “It wasn’t just us,” he said. “We talked with the Homeland Security people who did this. And they agreed, based on Minnesota’s special circumstances.”