British aliens in America!

February 8, 2019 10:55 AM

How many UK nationals currently reside in the United States? How many are in the US without official authorization? How many have typically been arrested, detained, or deported in recent years?

Why yes, this question was inspired by recent events in the news. I just want to get a sense for often this sort of thing happens (a Briton getting deported from the United States).

posted by skoosh to Law & Government (7 answers total)

Pew is the standard source for unauthorized immigrant estimates. Looks like they they have only a total estimate for Europe and Canada (about 500,000). About 95,000 of those are from Canada; the UK is less than that so isn't listed separately, as far as I can tell.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:23 AM on February 8, 2019

Best answer: The DHS keeps statistics on estimated visa overstays. For the UK, the numbers are ~25000 overstays in 2017, but that doesn't count how many of those got arrested/deported. General ICE statistics don't measure arrests/deportations by country. This article estimates the overall arrest rate for overstays at 0.4% which, making the huge assumption that ICE doesn't target different nationalities disproportionately, works out to the arrest of about 100 UK citizens in 2017.
posted by cardboard at 11:34 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you’re more broadly interested in mostly-white, English-speaking immigrants, this article estimates that there are 10,000 undocumented Irish people in the US and this one says that 34 were deported last year.
posted by mskyle at 11:55 AM on February 8, 2019

Best answer: ICE removed (the current legal term for deportations) 160 UK citizens in 2016 and 151 UK citizens in 2017 according to this report, which ICE puts out annually. See page 15. By contrast, ICE removed 128,765 citizens of Mexico in 2017.
posted by hhc5 at 7:51 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: And ICE removed 209 citizens of the UK in 2018.
posted by hhc5 at 7:55 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the quick turnaround! I think that answers my question. The question of how many UK nationals reside in the United States can be estimated by taking the figure of 280,000 in 2014 from this report and combining it with the 20,550 UK visa overstays in FY 2014 reported here, for a total of about 300,000 UK nationals in the U.S., more or less.

Of course, the prior answers made it much easier to find these figures, so thank you again for that.
posted by skoosh at 10:05 AM on February 9, 2019

It'll be more than that--if there were 20 thousand people overstaying visas, how many had visas (student, H1-B, etc) that they aren't overstaying, but would still reasonably be understood to be living in the US? (Of course, some of the people overstaying will have entered via the visa waiver program or on short term visas.) There are UK nationals that are also US citizens (hi!).
posted by hoyland at 12:44 PM on February 9, 2019