Pew: More than 60% of Hondurans in USA Illegals

A staggering number of Hondurans in the United States are in the country illegally.

According to Pew Research’s senior demographer Jeffrey Passel, “more than 60% of the 573,000 Honduran immigrants in the U.S. are” illegal, which is “a higher share than those from Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico.” 

Pew estimates that “over half of Honduran immigrants currently living in the U.S. arrived in 2000 or later, and about a quarter since 2006.” Since October of last year, there have been at least 17,500 illegal immigrant juveniles from Honduras who have been apprehended at the border, “making Honduras the country of origin for the highest number” of illegal immigrants. 

Honduras’s economy benefits from their migrants in the United States. According to the Pew study, “in 2012, 15.7% of Honduras’s GDP ($3 billion) came from remittances — the vast majority of which were U.S.-based.” Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the three countries that are sending the vast majority of illegal immigrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, are “the three most remittance-dependent nations in Spanish-speaking Latin America, by share of GDP.”