Luis Guzman’s career began with an act of effrontery. A New York ASPIRAnte, the veteran character actor describes himself as "a problem child"–a macho Lower East Side street kid who had attitude and was proud of it. One day, while wandering the halls of his school, he peeked into a classroom and saw his gym teacher auditioning students for a production of Bye-Bye Birdie.

"I walked in on the auditions and said, ‘Dude, you can’t even run a gym class–how you gonna direct a play?’ He threw the script at me and said, ‘Well, then, let’s see what you can do.’"

Guzman’s punishment was to play Mr. McAfee in the musical–which, in retrospect, was no punishment at all.

Twenty-some years later, Guzman is one of the most heavily employed supporting actors in American cinema–one of those rare souls who can be relied on to make good films better and bad films bearable. Following his screen debut in the prison drama Short Eyes, he appeared in countless films, most of them with a street flavor: Michael Mann’s influential cop show Miami Vice, Sidney Lumet’s brutal police corruption thriller Q&A, the heroin drama Jumpin’ at the Boneyard, plus The Hard Way, Carlito’s Way and many others.

Estimates cover total population, births and labor force

As of March 2010, 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States, virtually unchanged from a year earlier, according to new estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. This stability in 2010 follows a two-year decline from the peak of 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2009 that was the first significant reversal in a two-decade pattern of growth. Unauthorized immigrants were 3.7% of the nation's population in 2010.