How Many Illegal Immigrants Are in Michigan: Taxes and Enforcement

Estimates of how many illegal immigrants live in Michigan range from roughly 80,000 to about 102,700, depending on who is counting and when. The Migration Policy Institute puts the figure at around 80,000 using pooled 2019–2023 survey data.¹ The American Immigration Council estimated 102,700 for 2022, or about 14.9 percent of all immigrants in the state.² Michigan is not among the ten states with the largest unauthorized populations, and the Department of Homeland Security’s most recent national report did not publish a separate figure for the state.³

A third commonly cited number is much larger and measures something different. FWD.us reported in 2024 that 364,000 people in Michigan are either undocumented or share a household with someone who is, a count that sweeps in U.S. citizen children, spouses, and other relatives.⁴

Why the Estimates Disagree

No federal database tracks every person living in the country without authorization. Researchers instead use the “residual method”: start with the foreign-born population in census surveys, subtract everyone accounted for by legal immigration records, and treat the remainder as the unauthorized estimate.⁵ Two assumptions do most of the work. The first is how far to adjust for people the surveys miss, since unauthorized immigrants are less likely to respond.⁶ The second is how to model emigration, because the United States has not collected systematic exit data since 1956.⁷

MPI assigns legal status to individual survey respondents through a probabilistic model and weights the results to independent benchmarks. The American Immigration Council uses a screening checklist developed by Harvard economist George Borjas, classifying anyone who fails the checks as undocumented. Both methods are defensible; they simply handle borderline cases differently, and those differences compound at the state level. FWD.us isn’t contradicting either figure — it’s counting households rather than individuals.

Where They Come From

Mexico is the single largest country of origin but accounts for a smaller share than in border states. MPI’s 2023 data shows about 29,000 Michigan residents without authorization were born in Mexico (36 percent of the total), followed by Guatemala (8 percent), Canada (6 percent), and India (5 percent).¹ The American Immigration Council’s 2022 figures show a similar top of the list, with India at 14.2 percent, Japan at 5 percent, Guatemala at 4.4 percent, and China at 3.5 percent after Mexico’s 27.1 percent.² The Indian share is noticeably higher in Michigan than in many other states.

Age, Families, and Years in the Country

This is a working-age population with long roots. MPI data shows 68 percent are between 25 and 54 years old, about 12 percent are 55 or older, and only around 4 percent are under 16.¹ FWD.us estimated that 81,000 undocumented people in Michigan have lived in the United States for more than ten years, and 45,000 for more than twenty.⁴

Family ties to U.S. citizens are extensive. An estimated 60,000 U.S. citizen children in Michigan live with an undocumented parent, and 16,000 U.S. citizen spouses are married to an undocumented immigrant. Michigan is also home to about 33,000 Dreamers who arrived as children before 2021, roughly 4,400 of whom hold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protection.⁴

Where They Work

About 70 percent of Michigan’s unauthorized residents aged 16 and older are employed, and another 6 percent are looking for work. In total, roughly 54,000 hold jobs. Manufacturing is the top sector at 22 percent, followed by construction at 14 percent, professional and administrative services at 12 percent, and hospitality at 9 percent.¹ The manufacturing concentration tracks the state’s industrial base and runs higher than in most states.

Agriculture is a smaller but concentrated piece. Michigan has about 94,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers counting family members, according to a Michigan State University-affiliated study,⁸ and the American Immigration Council estimated that about 16.9 percent of Michigan’s agricultural workforce in 2019 was undocumented.⁹

Taxes Paid

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that undocumented immigrants in Michigan paid $290.1 million in state and local taxes in 2022: $113.9 million in sales and excise taxes, $94.4 million in income taxes, and $80.3 million in property taxes.¹⁰ Their effective state and local tax rate came to 8 percent, which Metro Times observed is higher than the 5.7 percent effective rate paid by the top 1 percent of Michigan households.¹¹ ITEP projected the state and local total would rise to $353.2 million a year if the same workers had authorization. A large portion of federal payroll taxes paid by undocumented workers funds Social Security and Medicare benefits most of them cannot claim.

Enforcement in 2025 and 2026

ICE activity in Michigan climbed sharply in 2025. Between January and October, ICE arrested 2,349 people in the state and booked 3,338 into detention, nearly triple the 2024 pace, according to Bridge Michigan’s analysis of ICE data. Most detainees had no criminal record; among those who did, the most common offenses were immigration violations or drunk driving.¹²

The North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin reopened in June 2025 as an ICE detention center operated by GEO Group under a reported $1 billion, 15-year contract.¹³ With 1,800 beds, it is the largest ICE detention site in the Midwest, and held roughly 1,400 detainees in early 2026 with an average stay of 49 days.¹⁴

1
Migration Policy Institute. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Profiles, Michigan
2
American Immigration Council. New Americans in Michigan
3
Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States, January 2018–January 2022
4
FWD.us. Michigan Immigration Factsheet
5
Pew Research Center. Unauthorized Immigrants Methodology
6
Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Estimates, 2015–2018
7
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Sensitivity of Unauthorized Immigrant Population Estimates
8
National Center for Biotechnology Information. The Michigan Farmworker Project
9
American Immigration Council. Immigration and Agriculture
10
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Undocumented Immigrants’ Tax Contributions 2024
11
Metro Times. Michigan’s Undocumented Immigrants Contribute $290 Million in Taxes a Year
12
Bridge Michigan. ICE in Michigan: More Arrests, Detainees, and Protests
13
ACLU of Michigan. ACLU Opposes Opening North Lake Correctional Facility
14
Michigan Advance. Protestors Gather Outside Baldwin Facility as Immigrant Detainees Launch Hunger Strike