The Number of Undocumented Immigrants in the United States

Thursday, May 16, 2019 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Event Calendar Category

ORC

Speaker Name

Mohammad Fazel Zirandi

Affiliation

MIT CSAIL

Building and Room number

E51-325

Abstract

We apply standard demographic principles of inflows and outflows to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the best available data, including some that have only recently become available. We develop an estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants based on parameter values that tend to underestimate undocumented immigrant inflows and overstate outflows; we also show the probability distribution for the number of undocumented immigrants based on simulating our model over parameter value ranges. Our conservative estimate is 16.7 million for 2016, nearly fifty percent higher than the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million, which is based on survey data and thus different sources and methods. The mean estimate based on our simulation analysis is 22.1 million, essentially double the current widely accepted estimate. Our results could help frame debates about policies whose consequences depend on the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. (Joint with Edward Kaplan and Jonathan Feinstein, Yale School of Management)

Biography

Mohammad Fazelā€Zarandi is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests are in the areas of public sector operations, data-driven decision making, statistical learning, applied probabilistic modeling and statistics. Mohammad's research has been published in leading journals such as Operations Research and Management Science, and has been reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and many other major media outlets.