Immigrants on Long Island: In 2022, counties were home to estimated 112,000 living illegally in U.S.

Long Island was home to an estimated 111,900 immigrants living in the United States illegally in 2022, an increase of nearly 20% from a year earlier, when the same population was about 95,600, according to a new analysis provided to Newsday of census data.

The increase comes as more than 174,000 migrants — most having crossed the southwest U.S. border from Mexico and then traveled north — have been processed through New York City’s homeless intake system since spring 2022. Some of those migrants have moved out to the Island.

But the analysis, by the Center for Migration Studies of New York, captures only part of the influx.

For instance, the analysis excludes those migrants who have been paroled into the country, under authority the Biden administration has exercised on a historic scale, admitting more than 1 million migrants since the president took office in 2021. The administration has done so under a decades-old law that Congress is now considering restricting.

The analysis also excludes migrants who have filed an asylum claim — including ones that are pending — or who otherwise are legally permitted to live in the United States, such as those subject to Temporary Protected Status, according to Matthew Lisiecki, a senior research and policy analyst with the center, who described the analysis's methodology.

And the analysis doesn't include those migrants who came after 2022.

Nationwide, the population of those living illegally in the United States grew to 10.9 million in 2022 from 10.3 million in 2021, according to the center's report, titled “After a Decade of Decline, the US Undocumented Population Increased by 650,000 in 2022.”

Long Island-specific figures aren’t listed in the report, which was published Jan. 28, but Lisiecki provided them to Newsday on Friday. In 2019, there were 89,400 migrants on the Island living illegally in the United States, according to the analysis. 

The nationwide figures represent “the largest increase since 2001, when the population increased by slightly more than one million,” the report says.

“The population grew rapidly because the population from Mexico stopped declining, undocumented migration from Central America continued to increase, arrivals from South America, particularly Venezuela, were higher than in previous years, and undocumented migration from India continued to grow,” the report says, adding: “The undocumented populations from 10 countries increased by a total of 525,000: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and India; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Central America; and Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in South America.”

The center’s figures — both national and local — are just estimates, based on a statistical analysis of an annual U.S. Census Bureau study, the American Community Survey questionnaire, that is sent to a representative fraction of the nation’s households. Respondents are not explicitly asked whether they are living in the country legally, so the center’s analysis used other data points to make educated guesses about respondents’ immigration status.

Overall, Long Island’s foreign-born population was 19.2% from 2018 to 2022, compared with 18.6% between 2013 and 2017, a statistically significant change, according to a Newsday analysis published in December 2023. The Island’s total population is nearly 3 million.

The center's analysis was done by Robert Warren, a demographer who for 34 years was with the Census Bureau and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service agency.

The Center for Migration Studies of New York is a think tank devoted to the “promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers,” according to its website.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.