Joseph Lawler, Washington Examiner, November 3, 2016

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.

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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. {snip}

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