People routinely (and perhaps purposefully) misunderstand statistics on immigration. In this post, I gather more years of data for the interesting top line of this table, from my just-prior post:
Source: Department of Homeland Security.
Note that there was no increase in the estimated number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. during this period.
Immigration Rule #6
There is no annual count of the illegal immigrants who successfully crossed the border. That, for the simple reason that they didn’t get caught. I went over that in these posts:
Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?
Post #1928: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands, part II
Almost every number you hear quoted as “illegals entering this country” is the count of illegal immigrants who got caught. Which is kind of a “duh” statement, because, as above, if you didn’t catch them, you can’t directly count them. Technically, yeah, they are “individuals who crossed into the U.S. illegally.” Stepping onto U.S. soil is what made it lawful for DHS to arrest them. But they aren’t illegal immigrants who now live here. The majority were caught within a few miles of the border and then deported.
Anyway, if you hear “two million” or so, that’s the folks who got caught in any recent year.
Best guess, as summarized in the prior posts on this topic cited above, your odds of making it across the border are maybe 30% to 50%, depending on who’s doing the estimating, and from what data source. That implies somewhere between one and two million per year successfully illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during that latest surge in attempted illegal immigration.
By contrast, if you hear “ten million”, that’s an estimate of the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. at any given time.
And if you can do simple math, and note that the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. doesn’t change much from year-to-year, you quickly realize that there must be a pretty large flow of illegal alien residents who leave the U.S. each year. Which is really the only point of this post.
Surprise: There is no strong trend in illegal U.S. residents, through 2022.*
Source: 2015-2018 report, Department of Homeland Security.
* Edit the next day: There’s now an extended discussion on methodology below. Original post follows.
Turns out, based on the best available information, there is no upward trend in illegal U.S. residents. The slight downward trend evident at the end of the graph above continued right on through 2022. (As you can see from the very first table posted here.)
If you prefer a simplified graph:
Source: 2022 report, Department of Homeland Security.
Not to restate the obvious, but that’s a couple of decades, over which the estimated number of resident illegal aliens has been fairly stable, at around 10 million.
As I noted in the just-prior post, this count of illegal residents is an indirect estimate. So there is some reason to question the validity.
That said, the method is consistent, because there are no huge jumps from one Census to the next. And if you bother to read the report, you can see that these figures jibe with just about every other credible estimate.
It’s reasonable to ask whether this apparent stability is just an artifact of methodology. I’m guessing not, even though this is remains rooted in the decennial Census. Note that the numbers remained reasonably stable through three different Census counts. and that, for the most recent counts, DHS uses the annual American Community Survey (also done by Census). If there had been a big uptick in self-reported foreign-born individuals in 2021, that should have shown up in the 2021 American Community Survey data that form the basis for the last data point shown.
If you read the methodology section of the DHS report in full, there appears to be essentially only one estimate that disagrees with the DHS estimate, and that’s based on some questionable and untestable assumptions.
Pew Research Center (Pew, July 2024) estimates that the number ticked up by 0.5M in 2022. Their methodology is similar to the one used by DHS. So, plausibly, the next DHS estimate will also show that uptick. Looks like the official number from DHS will not be updated until Spring of 2025.
Assuming DHS has that all correct, the bottom line is that this is the only credible estimate that exists, for the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S. The nuance you get from Pew is that this latest wave of attempted illegal immigration has, in fact, modestly increased the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S.
If I manage to find another estimated that differs markedly (other than the one addressed in the DHS document), I’ll add that in here.
No surprise: There is no trend in illegal U.S. residents.
This should really not be a huge surprise, unless you believe in magic. Because these folks have to make a living somehow. And the number of jobs available to illegal immigrants is small, and the types of jobs are limited.
Well, there’s no legal way for illegal immigrants to get government aid. I went over that in the posts cited above. Pick a Federal entitlement program and do the research, and you’ll come to the same conclusion.
(Though, technically, I guess if you show up at a hospital ER and are having a medical emergency, the ER must treat you due to EMTALA. And I think schools have to accept illegal kids. But you know what I mean. There’s no life of taxpayer-funded luxury awaiting illegal immigrants. Any government resources targeting immigrants are available to legal immigrants only, for all intents and purposes. Illegal immigrants are, for all intents and purposes, un-people according to the government.)
Ponder that a second, and the stability of that population begins to make sense. If you are here illegally, the only way you can stay here is to get a job. (That, or rely on private charity of some form.)
And if there are only so many jobs in the U.S. that can routinely be filled by illegal immigrants … then there’s sort of a natural economic capacity for the U.S. to host an illegal immigrant population.
For example, there are only about 1.3M hired crop workers in the U.S. Of those, about half are illegal immigrants. (They are a much smaller share of all farm workers, because the majority of farm workers are self-employed or unpaid family members of farm owners.)
Source: USDA, farm labor.
Note that the vast majority of illegal residents work in industries other than agriculture. The table above accounts for well under half-a-million illegal U.S. residents. Best estimate, there are more than seven million illegal immigrants holding down jobs in the U.S. (Pew Trust, 2020).
Near as I can tell, they do pretty much exactly the kind of jobs you’d think they’d do. Just think of any job that you wouldn’t want to do.
How can this be?
The one thing I am hazy about is the details on hiring. How can legitimate, tax-paying businesses hire illegal aliens? I mean, yeah, I checked, and it’s unambiguously illegal:
Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
This newspaper article provides a matter-of-fact view of it. It’s a straight-up case of don’t ask, don’t tell. Amongst the common tricks used for long-term employment of illegal aliens by tax-paying businesses are the following:
- Declaring workers to be independent contractors instead of employees.
- Requiring no verification of documents.
- Contracting out the hiring of labor — so that the folks who nominally “hired” the workers aren’t the ones who pay them.
Conclusion: Now the Republican rhetoric makes sense.
By far, the most mind-blowing statistic I ran across is that, in aggregate, about five percent of the U.S. workforce consists of illegal aliens.
And, I’m guessing, unless the size of the work force increases, or the fraction of jobs that are amenable to illegal immigrant labor increases, that’s about where it’s going to stay.
Which, in turn, pretty much determines the long-run size of the U.S. illegal-immigrant population.
And in the end, the stability of that resident illegal alien population makes perfect sense, from the standpoint of the underlying economics.
The upshot is that we have a large resident illegal alien population, of a stable size, due to private enterprise employing them, and a lack of government enforcement of the law.
But if you’re Republican, you can’t say that.
And, in fairness, the bleeding hearts on the other side of the aisle are unlikely to try to kick those folks out of their jobs, if they even could. They might even consider that undocumented immigrants fill a necessary and productive role in the U.S. economy, on average. And that, in some sectors such as agriculture, how can I say this, there would be supply-chain disruptions without them.
To put it as plainly as possible, just about nobody in power (with any sense) wants to fire the seven-to-eight million illegal aliens currently doing our least-desirable jobs. Certainly not all at once. Some out of sympathy, but the rest out of pragmatism and profit motive. And sure-as-shootin’ not when the unemployment rate is in the low single digits.
And, to an economist, I have to say, the current multi-tier system for immigrant (non-citizen?) labor looks almost as if it were designed to extract the most possible “value” (in the economic sense) out of that labor. You offer some guest-workers a 10-month visa, but you limit the number of those that you offer. The remainder of your guest worrkers, those not here legally under a visa, are then open for whatever the market will bear, in terms of exploitation.
At any rate, back to Republican policy: So they offer “sticky” stories. Haitians eating pets. Crime waves. Stealing American jobs. Just throw that at the wall, and see what sticks with their constituents.
So, unfortunately, it looks like dog meat is on the menu for the foreseeable future. That, because it is verboten for one political party to discuss the private-enterprise financial engine that supports our resident illegal alien population.
* CAVEAT ON THE METHODOLOGY
If you read one of the tiny-type sections above, you’ll see researchers at the Pew Trust recently updated their estimate of the resident illegal-alien population. They do more-or-less what DHS does, in terms of methods. They appear to be seeing an uptick in the resident illegal alien population starting starting around 2020. (And, if you look closely at the DHS graph, they show the same thing, just skipping one data point.)
Source: Pew, July 2024
If you look carefully at the end of the DHS estimate above, they too show a similar uptick between 2020 and 2022. They just didn’t fill in a 2021 number.
To the extent that I understand it, they used the count of all foreign born based on a roughly 1% sample (roughly 3 million) records in the 2022 Census ACS PUMS file. That’s one of the main drivers of change in that resident-illegal-alien number. (That, and changes in the separate count of legal citizens who were foreign-born.)
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except to say that the 2022 numbers are the most recent available. And they are good numbers, if you believe that recent illegal immigrants will answer the American Community Survey (in proportion to the extent that Census thinks their demographic does), and admit to being foreign-born. (Or, alternatively, they are good for showing trends, if any presumed proportional undercount remains constant.)
The only thing missing, really, is a “flash estimate” of what the population is likely to be today, after two more years of high rates of attempted illegal immigration.
I don’t think anybody does one, at least not publicly.
So the best you can say is that, through 2022, there was only a modest uptick in the resident illegal immigrant population of the U.S.
