The Philippines, which ranked as the fourth leading source of illegal immigrants in 2000 after Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, has dropped to seventh place at the start of this year, according to US statistics.

From 200,000 five years ago, about 215,000 undocumented Filipino immigrants, commonly referred to as TNTs (the Filipino acronym for “tago ng tago” or constantly in hiding), were estimated to be living in the US as of Jan. 1, 2006, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics said in a report recently.

They made up two percent of an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US at the start of 2006.

About 3.1 million of all unauthorized residents had come to live in the US in 2000 or later. One million entered the US in 2003 or 2004, while 2.1 million arrived during 2000 through 2002, the office said.

Mexicans made up more than half of the illegal aliens as of the start of this year at nearly six million, followed by Salvadorans (470,000), Guatemalans (370,000), Indians (280,000) and Chinese (230,000).

The office estimated there were 210,000 undocumented Filipinos in January 2005 and that the number grew at a slow rate of two percent a year.

There were also an estimated 210,000 illegal Koreans in January 2005, but their six percent average growth rate a year placed them ahead of the Filipinos in the overall rankings.

The report said illegal aliens were primarily attracted to California which drew in 2.8 million of them, Texas (1.4 million), Florida (850,000), New York (560,000), Illinois (520,000), Arizona (480,000), Georgia (470,000), New Jersey (380,000), North Carolina (360,000) and Nevada (240,000).

The report said estimating the size of illegal aliens living in the US was challenging because of data limitations.

Unauthorized immigrant population must be estimated by making certain assumptions and by combining data that measure events with those that measure populations, it said.

The US census of 2000 estimated there were about 1.9 million Filipinos living in the country, 32 percent of them US citizens by birth, 41 percent naturalized US citizens, and 26 percent permanent residents, or so-called green card holders.

Latest estimates put this number at between 2.1 million and 2.3 million.

By Jose Katigbak