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"The most recent Pew Hispanic Center 's study indicates that 97% of 12 to 20 million illegal aliens are working in construction, hospitality, manufacturing, restaurant, administrative and service jobs. Are these jobs that Americans will not do?"

Which jobs in those industries? Roofing in August? Cleaning hotel rooms? Bussing tables? Running a sewing maching in a factory all day? Killing chickens and dismembering them? I don't know what admin jobs illegals are doing, frankly. Service jobs? What type? Gardening?

Pretty much, yes, it's hard to find Americans to do many of those jobs. Try telling your teenaged daughter to apply at the local Holiday Inn for her summer job...they're looking for housekeeping help, I guarantee. She'll give you "the look." Suggest that your son go to work at the local Denny's bussing tables. "Yeah, right," he'll say.

Why is this? Well, in part it's because there are all those illegal aliens out there who want those jobs, and too few Americans who want them. Most of these jobs are the sort of scut work our teenagers used to do. Now, the teenagers want to either be an "intern" somewhere or don't want to do any darned thing at all except lie around and do nothing at all or head to the mall with YOUR credit card.

There is a Developer building three 600 k houses just a couple of blocks from where I live .
Not to long ago I walked by to see how they were doing and I found two separate crews working.The one doing the framing were speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent and the other crew was putting in the electrical and they were Brazilians.
I didn't ask them how much they were paid but if the developer couldn't afford to pay them whatever American carpenters and electricians would charge he has no business building the houses to begin with

"...28% of prisoners in federal prisons are illegal aliens, according the United States Justice Department. Not all of those 12 to 20 million illegal aliens have come to America to work. Some have come to commit crimes. ... 97% of 12 to 20 million illegal aliens are working in construction, hospitality, manufacturing, restaurant, administrative and service jobs."

Note this only includes the federal prison system and not local or state penal institutions

From http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/penalcontrol.shtml

# Number of federal prisoners, 2001: 125,904 # Percent of federal prisoners that are incarcerated for a drug offense, 2001: 56.3%

# Average annual growth in federal prison population, 1995-2001: 8.6%

# Number of prisoners the federal Bureau of Prisons is planning to hold in 2009: 211,516

So between 35,000 and 58,000 federal prisoners are illegal immigrants.

* Average annual percent growth, U.S. federal prison population, 1990-2000: 8.6% * Number of prisoners per 100,000 population, 1925: 79 * Number of prisoners per 100,000 population, 1980: 139 * Number of prisoners per 100,000 population, 2000: 478 * Number of prisoners and jail inmates per 100,000 population, 2000: 699

If the criminal prisoner rates are consistent, then about 85,000-140,000 illegal immigrants are in the state and federal jails and prisons.

My math must be off though, since the US population is nearly 300 million, and the article alleges the illegal population is about 5% of our total population.

My instinct tells me that there is probably a disproportionate number of illegals along the border states compared to the remainder of the country, and probably about a 5:1 ration of illegal immigrants in major cities near the southern border. If so, this would imply about 25% of the population near the southern border is composed of illegal immigrants.

This doesn't seem to mesh with my impression of the demographics. My gut feeling is that the numbers are off by about an order of magnitude.

Disturbing, nonetheless is the report that nearly a third of all federal prisoners are illegal immigrants. Especially considering many law enforcement activities simply release illegal immigrants rather than handling them due to logistical constraints.

Where the remainder of society only has less than about 0.7% of its population as federal or state prisoners, if true, this would imply illegal immigrants are about 20 times as likely to be composed of federal or state criminals who will be convicted and incarcerated in their midst as US citizens.

This number doesn;t check, however, with the alleged population of illegal immigrants.

My gut feel is that the illegal population is closer to 1 million than 20 million. The numbers would seem to balance better.