In almost half of the states (21 of 43), agriculture is the industry with the largest share of total workers who are unauthorized immigrants; in 10 other states, agriculture is the industry with the second largest share who are unauthorized immigrants.
Looked at another way—using the unauthorized-immigrant share of each industry’s workforce—the picture of industry concentration changes somewhat.
(Appendix Table A4 shows the three major industries in each state that have the largest shares of their workers who are unauthorized immigrants.)
Because unauthorized immigrants tend to have less education than people born in the U.S. or legal immigrants, they are more likely to hold low-skilled jobs and less likely to be in white-collar occupations; further, their status limits job opportunities.
These three industry sectors encompass 55% of unauthorized workers but only 31% of U.S.-born workers.
The states where leisure and hospitality is the largest sector for unauthorized immigrants tend to be in the West or Northeast (plus, not surprisingly, Florida).
Of all unauthorized immigrant workers, 22% are in services (professional, business and other3), 18% in the leisure and hospitality sector and 16% in construction (Table 1).
The industry concentrations of unauthorized immigrants vary across the states, depending, in part, on the countries of origin of the immigrants and the nature of each state’s economy.
Because they are so concentrated in certain major occupation groups, unauthorized immigrants are a high proportion of workers in some more detailed categories.
The leisure and hospitality industry has the most unauthorized immigrant workers in 14 states and the District of Columbia, construction does in 11 states and manufacturing does in 11 states.
Consequently, unauthorized immigrants tend to be overrepresented in certain sectors of the economy.
These 31 states are spread in all regions of the country.
(Data on the composition of all major industries are shown in Appendix Table A8.)
The states where manufacturing is the largest tend to be in the Midwest, and the construction-dominated states tend to be in the South.
Manufacturing (13%) and agriculture (5%) also have relatively large shares of the unauthorized immigrant workforce.
We produced estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrant workers by industry in 43 states and the District of Columbia where there are enough unauthorized immigrants in the workforce to provide reliable data.
Unauthorized immigrants also are overrepresented as a share of food preparation workers and servers (11%), production workers (9%) and transportation and material moving workers (7%) compared with their overall presence in the labor force.
As with numbers of unauthorized immigrant workers, the states where the construction industry workforce has the largest share of unauthorized immigrants tend to be in the South.
The construction industry is also one where the share of workers who are unauthorized immigrants tends to be large (first in 10 states and the District of Columbia, second in 15 and third in nine).
For example, 26% of farmworkers are unauthorized immigrants, as are 17% of building, groundskeeping and maintenance workers, and 14% of construction workers.
(Appendix Table A2 shows the largest three major industries in each state together with the share of the state’s unauthorized immigrant workers in the industry.)
The agriculture industry ranks first in this regard in every Western state for which data are available, except Alaska and Nevada; in Nevada, it ranks second.