The unlawful flow of Mexican immigrants into the U.S. continues to slow, and the nation’s overall illegal immigrant population fell by nearly a million to 11.1 million between 2007 and 2009, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report released Wednesday.
But Texas didn’t show a decline, according to the report, based on estimates derived from census data. Instead, the state’s illegal immigrant population stood at 1.6 million in 2009, an increase of 200,000 from a year earlier, although the report’s authors cautioned that the change wasn’t statistically significant and roughly fell within earlier ranges.
The authors at the nonpartisan Pew center avoided giving causes for the national contraction. But they noted that the recession and tougher immigration enforcement paralleled “the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades.”
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