How The AP's Investigation into Mexican Worker Deaths Was Done

By The Associated Press

The Associated Press used two primary statistical sources, both collected by the federal government, to do its own computer analysis of elevated death rates among Mexican workers in the United States.

The first source is the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, a Bureau of Labor Statistics project which catalogues the vast majority of U.S. workplace deaths. Those numbers, verified using multiple sources, allow analysis of workplace deaths from many angles _ in this case, by country of birth.

The second source is the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, the same source used to calculate the monthly unemployment rate.

Many Mexican-born workers are in the United States legally, either on work visas or as legal permanent residents. But because about half of the Mexican workers are undocumented, government statisticians use a complex set of calculations to project the total population of Mexican-born workers.

At the request of The AP, the population data were compiled by Jeffrey Passel, an authority on Mexican immigrant-related statistics from the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington, D.C., that develops population estimates that are cited regularly in academic research.

The AP calculated death rates for Mexican workers by comparing the estimated population of Mexican workers with the fatal injury reports.

The AP focused on Mexican workers because they are the dominant immigrant worker group in the United States and account for about two-thirds of deaths among foreign-born Hispanic workers. Workers from other Spanish-speaking countries were excluded from The AP's study because they are smaller in number, and government population estimates for them are considered less reliable.