Illegal Immigrant Population Increased by 88 Percent Since 2000, Group Says

The U.S. Presidential Election will occur in just over a year, in November of 2008. One of the big issues on the campaign trail is destined to be illegal immigration. The amount of illegal immigrants residing in the United States has increased 88 percent since the turn of the century. The current illegal immigration population in the United States is approximately 13,175,000 according to a recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, also known as FAIR. This information was provided in a recent press release from the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

According to the press release, the issue of illegal immigration is more prevalent in some states when compared with others. If you take the illegal immigrant population of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey it totals 8.4 million illegal immigrants. This is 60 percent of all illegal immigrants in the entire country. Those six states face a large budgetary hit from these illegal immigrants according to the press release. FAIR estimates that the cost of educating the illegal immigrants through high school, health care, and incarceration of criminals for those states is over $27 billion ever year.

These are not the only states that are having illegal immigration problems though. According to the press release, over 60% of the states in the country have seen their illegal alien population increase by over 200% since 2000. Out of the 50 states in the country, 24 of them now have illegal immigrant populations of over 100,000 people.