Number of illegal immigrants drops, first time since 1990, Pew says

The number of illegal immigrants in America stopped growing for the first time since 1990 - dropping from a peak of 12 million to 11.1 million last year, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study released Wednesday.

The average annual influx of illegal immigrants dropped as well, from 850,000 in the first five years of the current decade, to 300,000 in 2009.

The findings, based on extrapolations of U.S. Census data, may be attributable to fewer jobs in the troubled U.S. economy and harsher enforcement on the Southern border, Pew demographer Jeffrey Passel said.

About seven million illegal immigrants were employed in the United States in 2009, down from eight million in 2007, according to the report.

Deportations over the same period rose - from 319,382 in 2007 to 393,289, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Florida, Nevada, and Virginia saw the largest declines in illegal immigrants, according to Pew, a nonpartisan research organization, while Pennsylvania, with an estimated 160,000 illegal immigrants, New Jersey, with 475,000, and Delaware, with 20,000, were more or less flat because any changes from 2008 to 2009 were within the study's margin of error.

State estimates are based on smaller samples than national estimates and "should be treated with some caution," the study noted.

Overall, illegal immigrants make up about 4 percent of the U.S. population.

The study is the latest talking point for all sides in the national debate about illegal immigration.

Christine Thurlow Brenner, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University-Camden and a member of a commission advising Gov. Christie on immigrant integration, believes the decline is mostly jobs-related.

"Some people will spin this to say the heightened security is working," Brenner said. "To me, the decline demonstrates that jobs really are the key attractor" and the U.S. economy is a weaker magnet at the moment.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors limits on all immigration, said his Washington-based group did a study of the same time period. It suggested that the decline was caused by more than the recession, he said, citing better enforcement as another possible factor.

"For me, the policy point is that illegal immigration isn't some unstoppable force," he said. "The illegal immigrant population does not have to grow all the time."

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