Illegal Immigration Never Was a National Emergency
We have heard a lot from the president-elect about the threat of illegal immigration, from “they’re not sending their best” in 2015 to “They’re eating the dogs” last year. The underlying message is that the US effectively has no border and that we are being overrun by people entering illegally.
We are not being engulfed by illegal aliens, and we never were.
If we want to understand illegal immigration, we need to know the numbers. These are very complicated because different categories of people entering or exiting the country are counted differently. Here I try to give the best picture I can of how many people fall into the most important categories.
Yes, Large Numbers…
This is not to deny that we have had serious problems at the southern border, or that there was indeed a wave of people coming into the country. The graph below from Pew Research shows the big spike in “encounters” that started at the beginning of the Biden administration and ended this summer. Each encounter represents one border-crossing foreigner encountered by the Border Patrol. Encounters are not a good measure of how many people are getting into the country illegally, because once migrants are encountered, they are of often deported.
Note that when fear-mongering of the dangers of illegal immigration erupted in 2015, annual encounters were stable at around 300,000 a year, down from about a million per year during much of the Bush administration. Also note that the first big peak occurred in 2019. Who was the president in 2019? Hint: it was not Obama and it was not Biden.
Still, the big rise in 2021 of people trying to cross into the country was troubling. With something like 2 million encounters per year in 2021-2023, does that mean that the population of people living without permission in the United States had spiked?
…But Unauthorized Population Stable
Rather than using the dangerous-sounding “illegal” or innocuous-sounding “undocumented,” I prefer “unauthorized” to refer to people who live in the United States even though they have not been authorized to do so.
When we look at estimates of the unauthorized population, we find that the numbers were going down during the Obama administration. They continued going down during the Trump administration, and went up slightly in the first two years of the Biden administration. The rise from 2021 to 2022, when the Border Patrol encountered almost two million people, was about half a million people, and was still below the 2007 peak.
Looking back even further, we see that the unauthorized population has gone up and down a few times but in the last twenty years it has been fairly stable at 10-12 million people. I have not found estimates for the 2024 unauthorized population, but the 12 million I include in the figure is plausible, for reasons explained in the next section.
There is some uncertainty in the population estimates. Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration lobbying group described as “close to” Trump immigration foe Stephen Miller, gives much higher numbers. It claims that the number of unauthorized immigrants has risen from 11.7 M in 2013 to 16.8 M in 2023. They say the increase under Biden was 2.3 M from 2020 to 2023. Their estimate of the increase under Trump (2017 to 2020)? Almost as much, 2.0 M.
Not an Open Border
If so many people are crossing the border, why has the unauthorized population not exploded?
There are three main reasons:
- Every year a fair number unauthorized residents return to their native country.
- Many people who encounter the Border Patrol are expelled from the US.
- Many people who encounter the Border Patrol are given permission to temporarily remain in the US.
I have not seen estimates of how many unauthorized immigrants leave the US every year, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) keeps records on the people the Border Patrol encounters. The accounting system is complex and full of jargon, with some people being immediately expelled, and others granted permission to temporarily stay in the country. The most common reason for temporary permission is that a person claims “credible fear of persecution” for ethnic, political, or religious reasons, and DHS decides that the claim is plausible. The case is then reviewed by a judge before a permanent decision is made. Generally such people are released into the US where they wait – often for years – for a hearing. If the government decides eventually to grant them asylum, they can stay in the country. Most people are not granted asylum and are sent back, though some who are ordered to leave stay in the US anyway, at which point they become unauthorized immigrants.
The figure below shows the status of cases, for people that entered in each of several years, as of the beginning of 2022. The number of still-undecided cases is smaller for earlier years, in part because there were fewer people and in part because the system had time to come to a decision about more of them. The fiscal year 2020 is divided into pre-Covid (October 2019 to March 2020) and Covid (April to September 2020).
The figure shows that in every year except 2019, at least half the people encountered were expelled from the country sooner or later. While 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, had a giant rise in number of people encountered by the Border Patrol, fewer of them were still in the US than from Trump’s 2019 group. I could not find any updated documentation of many migrants were eventually expelled after 2021.
Lately Republicans have also been sounding the alarm about increased encounters at the US northern border with Canada. Northern border numbers are much smaller than the south, for instance 19,000 versus 107,000 along the southern border in August 2024.
The xenophobia lobby typically refers to the people with pending immigration cases as “illegal immigrants.” This is not correct. It is true that these people have not entered the US at an authorized Point of Entry such as an airport or official border crossing. But once they encounter the Border Patrol, the federal government has control of their movements and decides if they are expelled, held in custody, or released into the US. In fact, in recent years, most people crossing the border have actually sought out the Border Patrol to surrender to them, rather than trying to evade them. People do this in order to ask for asylum, mostly based on fear of persecution in their home country.
The people who are allowed to go free within the country are not unauthorized immigrants. They are visitors who have authorization to remain in the country until their case can be settled. Once that happens, past experience suggests that most will be expelled. Of the rest, some will be granted permission to live in the US as legal immigrants, and some who are ordered to leave will remain in the country as unauthorized immigrants
“Open borders” means that no one crossing the border is stopped by the United States government. The United States does not have open borders.
As the data above shows, many people are in fact expelled immediately. In Fiscal 2021, which includes the first year of the Biden administration, over a million people encountered by the Border Patrol were expelled. The federal government has thousands of patrol agents along the border, aided by billions of dollars worth of fencing, electronic sensors, and drones. The system was designed to intercept border crossers who want to surrender as well as those who are trying to sneak in.
Border enforcement was greatly expanded before the Trump administration. The Border Patrol had 4000 agents 1992. Under Clinton, that number rose to 10,000, and under Bush, reached 20,000. It reached a peak of over 21,000 under Obama, and stayed below 20,000 for the entire Trump administration and also during the Biden administration. In the same years, the Border Patrol budget went from $300 million (1992) to $1.1 billion (2001) to $2.7 billion (2009) to $4.3 billion (2017) to $4.9 billion (2021). About 650 miles of barriers was installed by 2011, along with an increasing number of drones, watch towers, and other electronics.
A Closer Look at the Human Border Flow
A recent Factcheck has summarized flows across the southern border for most of the Biden administration, February 2021 to October 2023. This misses the continued influx from November 2023 to June 2024 and the much smaller numbers since then, but gives a good idea of the numbers coming into the country. The chart below summarizes the information.
The boxes on the left show three categories of entry into the US. Box height shows how many people were in each category. A relatively small group was able to get appointments to meet with immigration officials at official Points of Entry (POE) such as customs stations or airports. A much larger group crossed the border and either intentionally found the Border Patrol or failed to evade it. A third group, often called gotaways, were able to evade the patrols and hide in the US as unauthorized immigrants.
How can we count the gotaways if they, well, got away? Estimates of their numbers have improved greatly over the years because of the expanding sensor network. The Border Patrol
says that most of the people who are not captured by federal agents are at least captured by cameras and other detection devices, and so can be counted.
What happened to the eight million people who crossed the southern border over the three years recorded here? This is shown by the rectangles stretching across the top of the chart. The largest group, almost half the border crossers, were sent out of the US. Another large group, over 2 million, were given permission to stay in the country while waiting for their court date. A few hundred thousand came from countries such as Venezuela that are considered so repressive that immigrants from there are automatically granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and can stay in the US for a “temporary” but open-ended amount of time.
It is the roughly 1.6 million people who evaded the Border Patrol who are unauthorized immigrants. If we add those to the population of roughly 10 million unauthorized residents in 2021, that brings us to around 12 million.
Out of 340 Million People
The total population of the United States is in the vicinity of 340 million people. Millions of people coming or going in the country is a large number, but a small fraction of the whole. This is illustrated by the figure below, which shows the population of the US divided into citizens (blue) and non-citizens (green). Citizens include US-born and naturalized, and non-citizens include authorized (both permanent residents and people with temporary visas for study or work) and unauthorized. The length of each bar shows the number of people, and the black marks inside the bar shows the fraction of the total.
The figure shows that about 16% of the population is foreign born, over 90% of the people in the country are citizens, and less than 4% are unauthorized immigrants. Through a decade of quiet enforcement by Obama, loud promises of mass deportation by Trump, and a large influx under Biden, the unauthorized population has stayed within 3-4% of the total population. Or to look at it another way, the “Biden Wave” of border crossings boosted the unauthorized population by about 8%. Meanwhile, the total population of the US rose by about 6%, mostly due to births and legal immigration. Result: unauthorized population increased from 3.1% to 3.6% of the total population. Looking back further in time, in the year 2000, unauthorized were 3.2% of the total.
Here’s another staggering figure: the number of people coming for vacation or a short business trip: roughly 50-60 million a year for vacation and another 4-9 million for business. Immigration alarmists have shouted about “military-age Chinese men” showing up at the border, yet not about the millions of military age Chinese men who have been coming to US universities for decades – or, for that matter, strolling the grounds of Disney World on vacation. Something like 40% of the USA’s unauthorized population is estimated to have entered legally on a visa and then “overstayed” past the visa period rather than sneaking over the border.
Bottom line: the Biden administration’s large increase in the number of people sneaking through the border (about 2 M if we include an estimate for 2024) or being given permission to wait inside the US for an immigration court decision (about 3 M) is still tiny compared to the number of annual visits to (around 60 M) or residents of (340 M) the United States.
Summary
A xenophobia lobby has been trying to give the false impression that the Biden administration opened its borders and tens of millions of people are immigrating into the US. The truth is:
- In the last decade (2013-2023), the population of people living in the US without permission has risen from about 11 million to about 12 million – growing from 3.5% to 3.6% of the total population.
- In that same decade, the total US population has gone up by about 19 M, mostly through births (13 M) and legal immigration.
- Under Obama, Trump, and Biden, many people trying to cross the border have been sent back, others have been allowed in because they are fleeing specific dictatorships or because they are being considered for asylum.
- The number of people trying to cross the border has increased a lot under Biden, but still amounts to around 2 million sneaking in and almost 3 million given permission to stay. About 4 million migrants were sent out of the country during the Biden administration.
- Biden border policy got stricter in June 2024 and since then monthly border encounters are almost as low as during the Trump administration.
Notes on Figures
plotUnath.png, plotLifeCycle.png, immFlowChart.png, plotpopcats.png
For plotpopcats.png, combined estimates of total population from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, naturalized citizens from the Census Bureau, and authorized non-citizen population from the sum of legal permanent residents and long-term visitors (mostly students and temporary workers). I could only find the long-term visitor numbers for a few years, so I used the same number (3 million) for all years. For 2023, I also added the estimated 2.8 M people granted parole or Temporary Protected Status in the US from 2021-2023. Unauthorized immigrant numbers are from Pew Research, with 2023 number taken from 2021 plus 1.6 M gotaways 2021-2023.