Chart of the Day: For the 7th Straight Year, Illegal Immigration Remains a Non-Crisis

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Here’s the latest from Pew:

The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population — 11.1 million in 2014 — has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession, as the number from Mexico declined but the total from other regions of the world increased, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on government data. …Mexicans remain the majority of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population, but their estimated number — 5.8 million in 2014 – has declined by about half a million people since 2009.

The immigration hawks claim that this all changed in 2015, and once we get that data we’ll see that the ravaging hordes are back. You betcha. But until we get that data, the actual facts remain about the same as always: the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US has been stable for nearly a decade, and it’s well below its 2007 peak. As crises go, illegal immigration is a pretty poor one.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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