There were about 8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. workforce in 2014, a number that didn’t change significantly since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, according to the Pew Research Center.
But as a share of the overall labor force, illegal immigrants have declined slightly from 2009 to 2014, from 5.2 percent to 5 percent.
Thursday’s report, written by researchers Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn and based on U.S. Census figures, indicates that the country’s reliance on unauthorized labor hasn’t changed much since the 2008 financial crisis, which drastically slowed or even reversed migration from Mexico. The report examines the illegal immigrant workforce up through 2014.
Before the crisis, especially as the housing bubble inflated, the share of unauthorized labor soared, from below 3 percent of the labor force in the 1990s to 5.4 percent just prior to the crash.
The stabilization of the illegal immigrant workforce in the five years following the recession coincides with a plateau in the overall illegal immigrant population. Pew previously reported in September that there were 11.1 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization in 2014, down from 12.2 million prior to the crisis. That small decline reflected a shrinking illegal Mexican immigration population, and an increase in illegal immigration from Asia, Central America, and Africa.
About 10 percent of the illegal immigrant workforce has been protected from deportation, according to Pew, by executive orders from President Obama. Hillary Clinton has said that she will expand on those orders. Donald Trump, in contrast, has indicated a more aggressive program to deport illegal aliens, although the details of his plans have shifted over the course of the campaign, and promised to build a wall along the Mexican border to deter further illegal immigration.
Illegal immigrants are most overrepresented in farming: Over a quarter of all farmworkers are illegal immigrants. They also tend to work in construction and leisure and hospitality.
Some states with large illegal immigrant workforces, such as California and Nevada, are actually seeing declines in the share of the labor force that is unauthorized. But seven states have seen significant increases in illegal immigrant labor since 2009: Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.
