The United States has experienced a sharp spike in immigration flows over the past decade. The Pew Hispanic Research Center has reported non-partisan statistical analyses and public opinion data chronicling the rapid growth of the Latino population and its implication for the nation as a whole to government stakeholders and officials that mandate new policies both foreign and domestic. The center uses the tools of social science research to improve understanding of the diverse Hispanic experience in the United States and to chronicle the Latino growing impact on the country. The latest figures compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center indicate that there are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, a number that includes more than one million children under the age of 18. Overall, the undocumented represent approximately 4% of the nation's population, 5% of its labor force, and 28% of its foreign-born population (Suro, 2005). However, these statistics could be challenged simply based on Scheuren’s (2004) account that bias could be an issue as the “findings are extrapolated from a sample of the Mexican population”. A stratified sample from varies regions of Hispanics would likely have yielded different results. Survey results tend to be mixed depending on if one is native born or migrant. Congress attempts to pass immigration reform laws in order to control or at least temper the illegal migrations. Research is gathered and used in order to make informed decisions that will be mutually beneficial for both migrants and the U.S. economy in terms of education, jobs, and otherwise.
Many Latinos from Mexico, Central America, and South America have made the decision to immigrate to the United States in recent years—whether legally or illegally. Latin American immigration is a political, economic, and social issue that has captured the attention of news media and its