Editors at National Review Online explain why the federal government’s immigration policy matters.
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the foreign-born population of the United States is down 2.9 million over the first 18 months of the Trump administration, and from this we can estimate that the population of illegal immigrants has fallen 2.3 million — from 15.8 million to 13.5 million. If these numbers extrapolated from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey withstand further scrutiny, the significance of this development is difficult to overstate. This would be the first time America’s net migration numbers have been negative — more immigrants leaving than coming in — since the 1930s.
Proponents of mass immigration have often argued that the movement of people across borders is practically unstoppable. Proponents of amnesty have argued that policy cannot remove illegal immigrants who have already arrived here, and that attempts to enforce the law backfire and bring about even more immigration.
It’s important to understand that these are not direct numbers for deportations or immigration. The Current Population Survey is not designed to measure immigrants and migration. But it does capture data from which researchers can make solid inferences over time. New lawful permanent residents and other new arrivals add to the foreign-born population each month. Deaths of foreign-born people living in America subtract from it. There is also a regular flow of foreign-born people who return to their home countries or travel to new ones.
The data from this survey captured the massive surge of the foreign-born population under former President Joe Biden, when the foreign-born population increased by 8.32 million in just four years, the fastest four-year increase of any period in American history. The CIS report notes that “the clear upward trend followed by a dramatic downward trend does track well with changes in the nation’s immigration policies, from a highly permissive approach to immigration during the Biden administration to the more restrictive policies during the second Trump administration.” Over the past 18 months, by this account, Latin American noncitizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of the decrease in this population.
