Illegal immigration is falling nationally, but it’s up in Charlotte. Here’s why.

As the number of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. continues to decline, Charlotte has gone in the opposite direction.

About 100,000 unauthorized immigrants were living in the Charlotte metro area in 2016, according to a Pew Research Center report published on Monday.

That figure — which includes Concord and Gastonia residents — increased by about 20,000 since 2007, putting unauthorized immigrants at about 4 percent of the region’s total population.

And nationally, it makes Charlotte one of the 20 U.S. metro areas with the highest number of unauthorized immigrants, as city officials contend with calls to better serve the city’s immigrant population as a whole.

Jeffrey Passell, a Pew senior demographer who co-authored the report, said that the increase likely goes hand-in-hand with Charlotte’s booming economic and population growth.

“The employment opportunities that were available were enough to keep people in those areas,” Passell told the Observer. “They’re not getting a lot of new ones, but they don’t seem to be losing a lot either.”

In comparison, traditional “gateway cities” like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles saw their respective number of undocumented immigrants drop by hundreds of thousands in the same 10-year period.

Of the 182 metro areas included in the Pew report, only two — Boston and Washington, D.C. — saw a greater increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants.

Charlotte was not much of an immigrant gateway in the mid-20th Century, said Owen Furuseth, professor emeritus at UNC Charlotte who has studied immigration to the region. But like other metros in the Southeast, it became a second or third stop for those who have relocated here in search of jobs and upward mobility.

And as those populations have become more established, the city has become more of an immigrant destination due to the existing community, economic opportunities and strong county services.

“You’ve got an infrastructure now,” Furuseth said. “Charlotte as an attractive place for immigrants is still salient, still important.”

The city’s unauthorized population has been at the center of some of Charlotte’s most notable political fights in recent months, as Sheriff Garry McFadden ended his office’s policy of collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In response, though, the federal agency said it had “no choice” but to ramp up arrests of those immigrants here illegally. That has created an often-tense debate between immigration advocates and Mayor Vi Lyles and Charlotte City Council, who on Saturday began a series of community meetings intended to present services to and brainstorm solutions with immigrants across the city.

At 55,000 people, Raleigh had the second highest concentration of unauthorized immigrants statewide, though that figure has remained the same since 2016, according to the Pew report.

It also found that other North Carolina metros with high concentrations of unauthorized immigrants include Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Virginia Beach, all of which have approximately 20,000 immigrants living in the country illegally.

Winston-Salem lost about 5,000 immigrants from 2007 to 2016, while populations in Greensboro and Virginia Beach stayed approximately the same.

This story was originally published March 11, 2019 at 5:33 PM.