National Public Radio: How America's Idea Of Illegal Immigration Doesn't Always Match Reality

The total number of people living in the country illegally — about 11 million — has made headlines recently, because immigration advocates suggest that under the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies, almost all of them could be targeted for deportation. (More than 700,000 "DREAMers" — immigrants who were brought into the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas as children — are still temporarily protected from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.)

A large majority of those people currently living in the U.S. illegally have been here for a decade or longer, which is a major shift from the situation at the turn of the millennium.[...]

Of people living in the U.S. illegally, more than half are from Mexico. The population from that one country far outnumbers the population from entire continents. But there are fewer people of Mexican origin living in the U.S. now than there were a decade ago.[...]

But there just aren't very many farming jobs in the U.S., overall. So farming is not a common industry for the 11 million — only 4 percent of people living here illegally work in agriculture.

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