How Many Illegal Aliens Are There?

WEBVTT
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We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United
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States undetected, undocumented, unchecked. And complete the dang fence.
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This bill that we will sign today is not a
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revolutionary bill.
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Cast down your bucket where you are.
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We come from France.
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And I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.
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They're coming in by the thousands, just unbelievable. A wall
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is an immorality.
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Who are you rooting for? Those masters of the universe
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are at it again.
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They're not sending their best. You maniac!
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You blew it up! Welcome to Parsing Immigration Policy, the
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podcast of the Center for Immigration Studies. My name is
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Mark Krikori, an executive director of the Center. And today
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we're going to talk about numbers. Don't turn off your
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podcast listening device, please. This is a pretty important question.
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There's no math test at the end of it. But
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the question is, how many immigrants are there in the
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United States? How many illegal immigrants? How many immigrants overall?
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And we have two of our stars in the studio,
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number crunchers extraordinaire, Stephen Camerota, our director of research, and
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Jason Richwine. What's your title, Jason? I forget.
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Resident scholar.
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There you go.
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Okay.
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Resident scholar, Jason Richwine. both of whom have worked on
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these most recent estimates of ours on what's the size
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of the foreign-born population. Has it grown or declined? And
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of that, what portion of it is illegal and how many?
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And also the growth in the population of immigrants from
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the Islamic world since 9-11. So these are publications that
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we released over the past several weeks. And so I
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want to start with Steve telling us what Did you
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find about the total foreign-born population and the subsets of that, Steve?
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Well, thanks, Mark. I'm glad to be joining you. You
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use the term foreign-born. Let's just make sure your listeners
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know exactly what that is. It includes anyone who's not
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a U.S. citizen at birth, so it would be naturalized citizens,
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lawful permanent residents, the green card holder. long-term temporary visitors
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like guest workers and students and illegal immigrants. Yes, illegal
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immigrants are included in Census Bureau surveys. And the latest
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survey from the month of July that we had analyzed,
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it's called the Current Population Survey, shows the foreign-born has
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fallen quite a lot since January of last year when
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President Trump took over. Overall, the total foreign-born has declined
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by about 2.9 million from January 2025 to July of 2026.
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This followed an 8.3 million increase in the prior four years,
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that is under President Biden, in the post-COVID border surge. Now,
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keep in mind, and this issue may come up again
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and again, these are all the net change. It is
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not the number of new arrivals. It's not the number
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of people leaving. New people are always arriving. People are
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always leaving. And there's also, for the overall foreign born,
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a significant amount of natural human mortality of about 300,000
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a year, which means that when we're looking at these numbers,
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we're looking at net change. Now, the huge decline does
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indicate that net migration out of the United States has
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probably turned negative. That hasn't probably been true since the 1930s.
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In other words, more people are leaving than are coming.
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We know that looking at several sources, but basically this decline,
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the only way to explain a decline of 2.9 million
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in that time period, because there should have only been
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around 400,000 deaths among the foreign-born, given their... We know
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a lot about the foreign-born in terms of their age
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and race and gender and so forth, so we can
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estimate death rates. That big decline has to indicate that
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a lot of people are leaving. Now, remember, there's margins
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of error around all these numbers, but still... there looks
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to be an increase in out-migration. Prior to the recent period,
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the overall foreign-born out-migration was usually reckoned to be about 750,000
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a year. That is 750,000 people leave each year, but
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it's a big population of 50 million people, roughly speaking.
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So it's not so strange that something like 1%, 2%
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would leave each year, but it looks like that number
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is way up now. But, you know, we do have caveats.
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Of course, there is, I say, a margin of error.
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So something has fundamentally changed. One of the other interesting
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things we find is all of that decline of 2.9
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million in the foreign-born in roughly a year and a
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half is among immigrants from Latin America who are not U.S. citizens,
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because they do ask whether people are citizens and they
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ask where you're from, are people from Latin America who
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are not citizens who said they arrived in America in
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1980 or later. And that population very much is highly
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correlated with the illegal immigrant population. As we know, illegal
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immigrants come very heavily, maybe three-fourths. The government and other
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outside researchers suggest about three-fourths of all illegal immigrants in
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America are from Latin America. And there shouldn't be many,
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if any, illegal immigrants who arrived before 1980. As I say,
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the survey asks, when did you come? Partly because there
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was an amnesty and there are some other things. In
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the 80s, there was an amnesty and most people took
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advantage of that amnesty. So there shouldn't be. And over time,
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of course, people who are here tend to go home or,
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of course, just natural mortality. And so there shouldn't be
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many illegal immigrants in the United States who came before 1980.
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And this huge decline in the post-1980 Latin American non-citizen
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population is a pretty clear indicator that illegal immigration is
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way down.
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And again, not just the illegal population is way down.
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OK, let's let's go over that.
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Yeah. So because new illegal immigration is probably down as well.
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But this is departures have gone up as well. Both
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things are going on. Now, remember, with the illegal population,
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you have a more complicated picture than when you're just
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looking at the overall foreign born. Because remember, among illegal
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immigrants just in any year, new people come. But some
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people here just go home on their own.
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Or they get deported. A lot of people go home
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on their own. They've earned the money. They don't like
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living here, whatever it is. So people are going home
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all the time. In addition to that, we legalize at
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least 100,000, sometimes 200,000 people a year because they either
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get asylum, they win the visa law, or they marry
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an American. Now, sometimes the law will trip them up,
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but still, there's still a lot of people legalizing every
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single year. And so they're exiting the illegal population as well.
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So you don't just have deportations and just voluntary departures.
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You have legalizations. And then finally, you have 50,000, 75,000
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deaths among the illegal population, again, just as part of
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natural human mortality.
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So in that.
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Context, a lot of illegal immigrants can come, but the
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illegal immigrant population not grow. And remember, unlike a typical
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human population, one exceptional thing about the foreign-born overall or
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illegal immigrants in general, or specifically, I should say, is
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that there are no births to these populations that add
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to it. All births to illegal immigrants, all births to
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legal immigrants, what have you, all, by definition, add to
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the native-born population, and thus we don't count them as foreign-born.
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We don't count them as being in the country illegally.
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We do estimate that the total illegal population, when President
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Biden left office, had reached 15.8 million. It had grown
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by nearly 6 million under him. That's the net increase.
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Many more than 6 million illegal immigrants came under Biden.
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But it hit nearly 16 million when he left office.
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And now we think it's about 13.5 million. So the
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precise number is we think it's down by about 2.3 million.
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So most of the decline in the foreign-born we see
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in the data seems to be due to illegal immigrants
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coming in much fewer numbers and leaving.
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So the total number... illegals as of this summer, according
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to your estimates, 13.5 million. What I wanted to ask
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Jason now, a lot of people on, frankly, the critical
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side among immigration hawks, poo-poo that kind of number saying
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it's just too low. And many of them are friends
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of ours and they may have some point in the
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sense that there's almost certainly an undercount. But Jason, you
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wrote something about this. Why do we think the number
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isn't dramatically higher? I mean, I suppose, and I don't
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think you gave like a range, but I could see
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it being a million or two higher than our estimate,
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maybe because of undercount, but why isn't it 20 or
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30 million people? Why do we not think.
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Well, first of all, I think that 13.5 million is
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still quite a problem. It's something we obviously have to address.
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Yeah, well, exactly.
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A matter of public concern here. So I think sometimes
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the debate gets framed in a way we don't want
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anyway by saying only 13.5, as if that's too small
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a number in general. No, I think it's very much
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worthy of our concern. The fact is, as some other
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demographers have said, people leave footprints. You can't hide in America,
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particularly with fertility. We have a calculation here. based on
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the fact that if there were 10 million extra illegal
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immigrants that we're just not finding in the data, then
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based on what we know about the demographics, mostly from
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Latin America, most are of childbearing age, about 45% women
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and so on, you'd expect about two 200,000 births or
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so from that population. And we just don't see it
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in birth records or school attendance. And keep in mind,
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there's quite an incentive for illegal immigrant parents to register
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these things. If you want birthright citizenship, you better make
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sure that this birth is recorded in a US hospital.
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And also, you know, public schooling is free, you know,
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due to a Supreme Court ruling in the 80s. All
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children of illegal immigrants can go to school. Why would
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you not want them to enroll in school? So I
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think for all those reasons, it really can't be substantially
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more than this 13 and a half million that we're estimating.
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But I think there are some good reasons some people
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think it's higher than that. I mean, on this most
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superficial sense. People go to Walmart. There's a lot of
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people speaking Spanish. Therefore, they must all be illegal. That's
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kind of silly. But there are good reasons that people
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think it's higher even though it's not actually higher. What
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is that about?
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Well, yeah, I think people are right to think about
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kind of the broader population impact of illegal immigration because
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even though you have a lot of people who are
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not illegal, they have legal status, they're often here because
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of illegal immigration in some way. The obvious example is
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birthright citizenship.
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Right.
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Right.
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So if you take the existing illegal population and add
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in all of their children, both minor children and who
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we think are the grown children, so to speak, of
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those illegal immigrants, and then you add in the formerly
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illegal immigrants.
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Right. The ones that Steve was talking about who get
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legalized in various ways.
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They married a US citizen or something like that. Put
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that all together and you do probably get roughly 30
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million people.
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Right.
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So I'm sympathetic to that sense that people have that
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intuitive feeling that there's 30 million illegal immigrants. But you
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have to remember, a lot of those 30 million, probably
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a majority of those 30 million are illegal and they're
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here because of our policies, not because they failed to
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follow the law.
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Right, right.
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Or somebody failed to follow the law, but maybe because
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we didn't enforce the law.
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Well, birthright citizenship is a perfect example.
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I mean, that's a policy.
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I know that the Supreme Court recently affirmed it, but
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it doesn't stop me from saying it's a terrible policy.
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Right, right.
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That's the problem.
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Absolutely. On the other hand, while I get that 20
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or 30 million is an understandable misunderstanding or misperception of
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the total illegal population. Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol agent
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who's forcibly retired, who was the kind of field operator
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of the theatrical Kristi Noem enforcement efforts that culminated in
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the fiasco in Minneapolis, he's now going around saying not
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only– he used to say there are 100 million illegal
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aliens– Now he's upped it to 107 million illegal aliens
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as though he's somehow done the math. And so that
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strikes me as just– I mean it's preposterous on its face,
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but it doesn't even reflect the kind of thing you're
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talking about where sort of the illegal immigration and its
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immediate consequences as it were.
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It's unfortunate that he's saying this. I don't really know
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where it comes from. I tried to find where it
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comes from. It's sort of just a lot of vague
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statements more than his numbers. Just to think of it
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in one way, there's many ways of thinking about this
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in a way that shows it's ridiculous. But one way is,
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what are the three largest states by population in America?
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Do you know those? California, Texas, and New York, right?
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Or Florida.
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Florida actually recently overtook New York.
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Yeah, that's right.
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But if you add those three up, you still get
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a little bit less than 100 million. So what he's
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saying essentially is that the combined population of California, Texas,
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and Florida– are hiding somewhere in the country. So in
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the Census Bureau data, it finds about 50 million or
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so foreign-born individuals. So somehow that means we're missing two-thirds
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of the foreign-born, two-thirds from the census. It just doesn't
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make a lot of sense. And I think Steve alluded
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to this earlier, but let me make it a little
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more clear when I say that the reason we care
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about this is not because we're really offended by the
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idea of someone saying something incorrect, although as a data guy,
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I really do want people to be honest with the data.
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The practical objection here is that we have so many
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very good statistics that can come out of Census Bureau data,
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very good in the sense that they're useful for our
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side to show that immigration has a lot of consequences,
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and a lot of those consequences are negative. We can
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use Census Bureau data to talk about population, welfare, crime,
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housing impact. We have a paper coming out on that soon.
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All these things we can do to add ammunition to this.
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And if someone comes along and says, actually, the census
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is so wrong, so wrong that it's missing two-thirds of
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the immigrants, that means that all this work is useless.
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And I think that would be really sad. Not only
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is it just untrue as a factual matter, but it
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also makes it practically very difficult for us to make
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the arguments we want to make.
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Can I jump in here for a second, Mark?
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Yeah, sure. Okay, so let me just give the listeners.
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So we know from school enrollment data how many kids
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are in public school. Jason mentioned this. You can look
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at it from, say, 2019 to 2025. We have that data.
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And it's actually down some, right? Now, we had a
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lot of what they call unaccompanied minors. We had family
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units come in at the border. There are places where
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it's overwhelmed. It really impacted enrollment. But I'm talking here
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national enrollment. If you had even 10 million extra illegal immigrants,
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that would have had to add 1 to 2 million
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kids to public school, at least a million, maybe more.
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But the point here is we see a significant decline
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in school enrollment, and I'm talking here public school. Now,
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the only way to reconcile something like school enrollment with
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the idea that the illegal population is 30 million or
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100 million is to say, They're sending their kids to
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private school that we can't measure as well.
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Or they're homeschooling them all.
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They're homeschooling them. You know, it's not legal to keep
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a kid, even an illegal immigrant kid, out of school.
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So you'd have that issue. But one of the main
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motives in all the survey data of people coming to
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America is the greater educational opportunities for their children. It
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seems very odd that they're not taking advantage of free
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public education. And as Jason said, the number of births
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in the United States is actually down in the last
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seven years. So somehow you have to assume that of
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the illegal population, about 38% are women in their childbearing years.
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So as Jason put out, as I think the number,
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if you were to have 10 million extra illegal immigrants,
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it should be about a quarter of a million extra
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births in the United States, not the significant decline we
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see during the border surge.
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And there's just not that many people in a modern society.
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who were born off the grid. In the old days,
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it might have happened. I'm sure there's still a few
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instances of it, but not hundreds of thousands.
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Let me give you just one other piece of data.
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We don't see it in employer data, right? Employers. So
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all these people are here and they're just living in
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basements and not working. That seems very hard to believe too.
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So in other words, we have a reality check, something
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we can check it in, but I'll just add one
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more point. I think the main reason people think this is, look,
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if you step back Total immigration to the United States
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since 1965, that's legal and illegal. All the children and
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now some grandchildren they've had added about 90 million people
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to the U.S. That's a lot, right? So that's part
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of it. And I just see those numbers. And I
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have this theory that one of the things that goes
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on is that whenever the media covers legal immigration, they
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talk about how hard it is. Now, you can argue
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it's hard or easy.
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I won't. How hard to immigrate illegally? Yeah, legally it
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is to the United States.
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Right. So they say how hard it is to come.
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And the public has a sense that, well, legal immigration
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is somewhat restrictive. And so this massive growth that I
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see with my own eyes must be driven by illegal immigration.
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Nothing could be further from the truth. Legal immigration, permanent
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immigration is over a million a year. Temporary long-term immigration,
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which I mentioned at the outset. That's got to be
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a million a year too, though most of those people
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do go home. Overall, there are 38 million legal immigrants
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of various kinds, naturalized citizens, green card holders, long-term temporary visitors. Here,
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38 million. Somewhere between one out of every seven and
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one out of every eight adults in America is a
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legal immigrant. If we go back to that 90 million figure,
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it's likely legal immigration has added about 60 million to
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the U.S.
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Population.
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And illegal immigration, as Jason pointed out, is somewhere around
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30 million.
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And again, the consequences of illegal immigration, not the illegal population.
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How much has it added when you take into account children.
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So these are enormous scales, but it's still two-thirds legal.
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I just don't think people are aware. I mean, in
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many ways, the United States' legal immigration system is so
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generous that it's possible you could say that half the
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world's legal immigrants reside in the United States, especially those
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who have a clear pathway to citizenship. Countries in the
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Middle East, say, have lots of guest workers, but those
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people have no prospect The bottom line is the scale
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of illegal of legal immigration to the United States is enormous.
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And I think that's partly what confuses people.
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And it also kind of when you talk about it
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that way, it distracts attention from, as Jason said, policy.
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In other words, it's not just a question of enforcement
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not being done well enough, which is a real problem, obviously.
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Even now, even under this administration, they're not doing enough
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worksite enforcement. But it's actually Congress's problem. rather than the
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executive branch's problem, because Congress is the one that set
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up this legal immigration system. And the president can't just say, yeah,
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we're not going to do that. I mean, it's operating.
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He can tighten it up or what have you, but
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it's on autopilot. And the other thing is, if there's
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107 million illegal aliens, what's the alternative to legalizing them all?
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Civil war? I mean, it's absurd. So it's just preposterous
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on its face, I have to say. You guys, if anything,
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have been more polite about it than I think it warrants.
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One question before I move on to the other thing is,
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There presumably is some undercount in this, and this is
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something that people critique. Well, they're not answering the survey questions,
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and people just think it's preposterous that illegal immigrants are
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sending back or participating in a census survey. So if
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you could just talk a little bit about, either one
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of you, sort of what is the origin or nature
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and maybe scope Yeah, so let.
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Me start with maybe the big picture. In terms of
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the foreign-born, it is reasonable to ask the question, look,
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you're telling me it's down by 2.9 million in about
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a year and a half. That is very large, and
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I agree. So what we did in our most recent
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report is we tried to look to see if we
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could find evidence that maybe the illegal immigrants are here,
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illegal immigrants in particular, but not answering the survey. A
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very real possibility, right? So we looked to see if,
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for example– The survey does suffer from a serious problem,
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and that is the response rates over the last more
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than two decades, people have been less willing to take
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part in the survey. This long predates the recent surge.
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It predates Trump. It predates Biden. But it's a long-term
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problem that the Bureau is well aware in trying to fix.
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But when we look at those response rates, that is
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the people who aren't answering the survey, we don't see
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that in any way it's correlated with the size of
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the foreign-born. See, if it's the immigrants who are not
403
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taking part in some systematic or biased way, then when
404
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they're not in the survey, you would expect the foreign-born
405
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to fall. That doesn't happen.
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In other words, everybody is less likely to answer the survey, period.
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It's kind of like in polling. That regular polling, they're
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finding the same thing.
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Well, there's all kinds of cooperation and things that people
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are just less willing to do. People are less willing
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to send their census.
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But it's not immigrant specific.
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It doesn't appear to be. Okay. So there's some other
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things we can look at very briefly. We know what
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share of people on the survey are refusing to answer
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specifically the immigration questions like your citizenship, what country you're
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born in, what country your parents were born in.
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And they don't ask if you're illegal. So that's kind
419
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of our estimate of various attributes. So it's not even
420
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as though they have to check a box that says, yes,
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I'm an illegal alien.
422
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Very briefly, you estimate the illegal population by first estimating
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the legal population based on administrative data and then subtracting
424
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that from the total foreign born and then adjusting for undercount.
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We don't think the undercount's that big. As I said,
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I mean, there's lots of other ways in which we
427
00:22:44.069 --> 00:22:46.690
look at this question of whether the survey is not
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00:22:46.769 --> 00:22:49.309
picking people up. People come in and out of the survey,
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and you would expect the new people who are coming
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into the survey each month, they would be the ones
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who'd be especially reluctant to take part because they don't
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have an existing relationship with the Census Bureau that's taking
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the survey. And there are other things. We can look
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at jobs data. Everything seems to indicate that the foreign-born
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is way down. Is the survey perfect? No, absolutely not.
436
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Is there a margin of error? Absolutely. And you need
437
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to take that into account. But the best and most
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up-to-date data we have show a huge decline in the foreign-born,
439
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and it looks to be overwhelmingly of illegal immigrants.
440
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And most of those, just to finish it, maybe, Jason,
441
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if you have thought on this, most of it does
442
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seem to have been people who left on their own, right?
443
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Because the number of deportations in that period, even though
444
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DHS has not been real forthcoming in delivering the data
445
00:23:41.529 --> 00:23:45.130
on this, doesn't amount to whatever, you know, in other words,
446
00:23:45.430 --> 00:23:48.390
isn't large enough to have accounted for that decline in
447
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the illegal population. Yeah.
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So the number of deportations may well have tripled relative
449
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to what it was on the last year and a
450
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half under President Biden. But that's still not enough.
451
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You know, tripling the level of deportations under Biden is
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As a joke that you often say is like being
453
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the best hockey player in Ecuador. It doesn't really tell
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00:24:07.759 --> 00:24:08.240
you very much.
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00:24:08.299 --> 00:24:12.109
Right. Now, remember, we're talking about only interior removal is
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actually the technical term. So if you're at the border
457
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and you're removed, sometimes you see people count that number
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because you got caught at the border or within a
459
00:24:20.730 --> 00:24:24.509
few miles of the border. I'm talking here, interior removals
460
00:24:24.670 --> 00:24:27.910
are clearly way up based on what administrative data has
461
00:24:27.970 --> 00:24:31.269
been released, but it can't account for this. It has
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00:24:31.349 --> 00:24:35.690
to be people leaving. Now, remember, we're still legalizing illegal
463
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immigrants as well. For example, when a person successfully gets asylum.
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00:24:40.079 --> 00:24:43.680
And so that's also going on. It's called adjusting your status.
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And so that is still causing some out-migration of the illegals,
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00:24:47.759 --> 00:24:51.279
but mostly it looks like a big increase in just
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00:24:51.359 --> 00:24:52.420
voluntarily leaving.
468
00:24:52.759 --> 00:24:56.500
Right, right. So I want to talk about the other
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00:24:56.539 --> 00:24:58.849
thing we wanted to get to is the level of
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immigration from Muslim countries since 9-11. And so the point
471
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here was to highlight that this is, even though we
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had a serious shock 25 years ago, that doesn't seem
473
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to have been reflected in changes in government policy in
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the interim with regard to the immigration of people from
475
00:25:20.140 --> 00:25:23.519
countries where terrorist groups are very active or the governments
476
00:25:23.539 --> 00:25:29.470
themselves are hostile? Whoever wants to give a quick– the
477
00:25:29.609 --> 00:25:32.029
Cliff Notes version of what we found there. Yeah.
478
00:25:32.089 --> 00:25:35.029
So as you point out, look, we thought that maybe
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increased vetting of people from the Muslim world, or maybe
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we thought that maybe fewer people would want to come
481
00:25:41.720 --> 00:25:45.079
from the Muslim world so that post 9-11, maybe the
482
00:25:45.119 --> 00:25:48.059
numbers wouldn't show a whole lot of growth. Again, we're
483
00:25:48.079 --> 00:25:51.190
looking at Census Bureau data, and that would count legal
484
00:25:51.210 --> 00:25:53.430
and illegal. It would count everyone, but it also takes
485
00:25:53.470 --> 00:25:56.089
into account all the people who both come and go.
486
00:25:56.109 --> 00:25:59.490
And what we found is, as you said, From the
487
00:25:59.549 --> 00:26:02.509
Muslim world, which I should point out, by no means
488
00:26:02.549 --> 00:26:04.890
are we saying that, remember, the census doesn't ask about
489
00:26:05.170 --> 00:26:08.670
your religion. So there are Muslim immigrants who come from
490
00:26:08.730 --> 00:26:13.299
non-Muslim countries, and there are non-Muslims who come from the
491
00:26:13.319 --> 00:26:17.359
Muslim world. That is, these predominantly Muslim countries throughout the
492
00:26:17.380 --> 00:26:20.759
Middle East and North Africa and even into Asia. But
493
00:26:21.140 --> 00:26:26.349
when we look at those countries, we find that basically 2001,
494
00:26:26.349 --> 00:26:29.440
which is when September 11th happened, there are about 1.7
495
00:26:29.440 --> 00:26:32.960
million people from these countries, and now there are 3.4 million.
496
00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:37.039
So it more than doubled over this time period. The actual,
497
00:26:37.160 --> 00:26:42.309
the precise increase was about 103%. Just to maybe put
498
00:26:42.329 --> 00:26:45.650
that into a little context, the overall number of immigrants
499
00:26:45.690 --> 00:26:50.089
in the United States increased enormously by about 58%, but
500
00:26:50.150 --> 00:26:54.230
still not the 103% that immigrants from the Muslim world did.
501
00:26:54.549 --> 00:26:57.240
And of course, if we look at just the U.S.-born population,
502
00:26:57.519 --> 00:27:01.559
which would include the U.S.-born children of immigrants, since 2001,
503
00:27:01.559 --> 00:27:05.450
it's grown by 15%. So the overall immigrant population is
504
00:27:05.529 --> 00:27:09.869
up 58%, many times what the native-born population is, but
505
00:27:09.970 --> 00:27:13.849
the Muslim immigrant population is up nearly twice what the
506
00:27:13.910 --> 00:27:17.599
immigrant population overall is up. And as Mark pointed out,
507
00:27:18.039 --> 00:27:20.200
there are some things about it. I'll just mention one thing.
508
00:27:20.579 --> 00:27:24.420
many of the top immigrant-sending countries from the Muslim world
509
00:27:24.740 --> 00:27:28.299
have either hostile relations with the United States or struggle
510
00:27:28.619 --> 00:27:31.660
with very powerful terrorist movements. Again, 2001 to 2024, the
511
00:27:31.700 --> 00:27:33.900
number of immigrants from, say, Afghanistan is up 476%.
512
00:27:33.900 --> 00:27:34.400
From Pakistan, it's up 93%.
513
00:27:34.400 --> 00:27:35.609
For Iran, it's up 41%. For Syria, it's up 109%.
514
00:27:35.609 --> 00:27:52.140
And from Yemen, it's up 416%. These are striking numbers.
515
00:27:53.039 --> 00:27:55.140
The pace of immigration from that part of the world
516
00:27:55.700 --> 00:27:58.880
is very high. The growth rates are very high. So
517
00:27:58.920 --> 00:28:01.059
clearly a lot of people want to come from there.
518
00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:04.720
And our immigration policies and our vetting procedures are certainly
519
00:28:04.759 --> 00:28:07.500
not deterring people from coming. Though I should point out
520
00:28:07.559 --> 00:28:10.519
one other thing. These numbers are only through 2024 because
521
00:28:10.880 --> 00:28:13.720
we have more up-to-date numbers and we have looked at them.
522
00:28:14.200 --> 00:28:16.720
But the problem is the Muslim immigrant population is still
523
00:28:16.759 --> 00:28:21.150
a relatively modest share of the overall immigrant population. It's
524
00:28:21.250 --> 00:28:24.529
better to use this 2024 survey, which is done each year,
525
00:28:24.789 --> 00:28:28.049
called the American Community Survey. It's harder to use the
526
00:28:28.150 --> 00:28:30.329
monthly current population survey.
527
00:28:30.369 --> 00:28:35.259
Because it's a survey and the numbers of people responding. Yeah, exactly.
528
00:28:35.400 --> 00:28:36.559
In the American Community Survey, yes.
529
00:28:36.599 --> 00:28:38.839
So we're getting toward the end. But Jason, I kind
530
00:28:38.859 --> 00:28:41.779
of wanted to ask you a broader question about what
531
00:28:41.839 --> 00:28:46.000
is the role or what is the benefit of statistics
532
00:28:46.099 --> 00:28:49.109
like this, of the number crunching that we do on
533
00:28:49.140 --> 00:28:51.859
immigration in Is there something we're getting out of this?
534
00:28:51.980 --> 00:28:54.859
I mean, obviously, nothing's perfect. There's always a margin of
535
00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:58.549
error in these things. But can this kind of thing
536
00:28:58.619 --> 00:29:03.650
inform policy in a constructive way? Or are we basically
537
00:29:03.690 --> 00:29:07.829
just coming up with numbers that people can then throw
538
00:29:07.890 --> 00:29:10.549
at each other and argue about? Any thoughts on that?
539
00:29:10.670 --> 00:29:12.789
Well, I certainly hope it can inform policy. I mean,
540
00:29:12.809 --> 00:29:14.930
it helps to clarify a lot of things that we
541
00:29:14.970 --> 00:29:18.109
might not otherwise understand very well. I mean, in the
542
00:29:18.150 --> 00:29:22.630
case of Muslim immigration, I'm working on a group project
543
00:29:22.650 --> 00:29:25.339
that has sort of an international scope where representatives of
544
00:29:25.359 --> 00:29:28.599
different countries are putting together little profiles of immigrants in
545
00:29:28.619 --> 00:29:32.220
their countries, including fiscal impact and crime effects and the like.
546
00:29:32.940 --> 00:29:37.069
And from my counterparts in Europe, their attitude often is, well,
547
00:29:37.329 --> 00:29:39.970
we have a big problem with Muslim immigration, but you don't.
548
00:29:40.200 --> 00:29:40.519
Really.
549
00:29:41.119 --> 00:29:42.740
And it's true, of course, but I mean, a lot
550
00:29:42.759 --> 00:29:46.779
of that is selection effect, whereby we get people with
551
00:29:46.819 --> 00:29:50.420
greater skills in the United States than the European countries.
552
00:29:50.740 --> 00:29:53.640
But I would point out that, again, here's a place
553
00:29:53.660 --> 00:29:57.049
where the numbers help, that Muslim immigrants, I should say,
554
00:29:57.230 --> 00:30:01.509
from predominantly Muslim countries are not necessarily as high performing
555
00:30:01.529 --> 00:30:05.910
as you might think, partially because sometimes people confuse immigrants
556
00:30:05.930 --> 00:30:08.329
from India with Muslims, and most of them are going
557
00:30:08.349 --> 00:30:10.990
to be Hindu, and they do have very high socioeconomic status.
558
00:30:11.470 --> 00:30:13.529
But just looking at some basic welfare numbers here, I mean,
559
00:30:13.549 --> 00:30:16.390
that same group of people that Steve talked about, predominantly
560
00:30:16.410 --> 00:30:19.930
Muslim countries, you know, about half of households headed by
561
00:30:19.950 --> 00:30:22.670
that group are on some form of welfare compared to
562
00:30:22.670 --> 00:30:26.640
30% of natives. So that's not a group that's necessarily
563
00:30:26.680 --> 00:30:29.779
doing extremely well in America. And I think the broader
564
00:30:29.819 --> 00:30:33.609
point here too is there's a kind of truism about
565
00:30:33.619 --> 00:30:38.130
immigration from particular countries, which is that initially the flow
566
00:30:38.230 --> 00:30:40.410
tends to be high skilled, but it becomes less and
567
00:30:40.430 --> 00:30:43.450
less skilled over time. And you can see that with
568
00:30:43.490 --> 00:30:47.119
the Afghan flow, especially when you get refugees, asylum seekers
569
00:30:47.150 --> 00:30:50.440
and the like, they tend to be much more representative
570
00:30:50.680 --> 00:30:54.660
of the country itself and therefore more problematic in both
571
00:30:54.740 --> 00:30:56.119
economically and culturally.
572
00:30:57.319 --> 00:31:00.019
Okay. One of the things, I think one of the
573
00:31:00.059 --> 00:31:04.700
most important things the center does is try to get
574
00:31:04.920 --> 00:31:10.410
the surveys that the government's already doing, asking questions of
575
00:31:10.490 --> 00:31:13.869
them that other people aren't asking. In other words, we're
576
00:31:13.910 --> 00:31:16.990
not going out and conducting the American community survey. The
577
00:31:17.029 --> 00:31:20.039
data's all there. If the Census Bureau or the Homeland
578
00:31:20.059 --> 00:31:24.109
Security Department or somebody wanted to do this analysis, wanted
579
00:31:24.130 --> 00:31:26.750
to ask these questions, they could, and they'd come up
580
00:31:26.789 --> 00:31:29.289
with basically the same answers we have. It's just that
581
00:31:29.309 --> 00:31:32.819
nobody's answering, nobody's asking these questions. And so I think
582
00:31:32.839 --> 00:31:37.680
this is an important role of what you guys do is, again,
583
00:31:38.079 --> 00:31:44.099
asking the questions of the existing public data that nobody
584
00:31:44.200 --> 00:31:48.059
else wants to ask, or frankly, maybe is equipped to ask.
585
00:31:48.220 --> 00:31:50.700
So thanks for coming in. We're going to have links
586
00:31:50.819 --> 00:31:56.990
to these various reports. on the show notes. And we will,
587
00:31:57.369 --> 00:32:01.799
you know, as the situation develops, we'll try to get
588
00:32:01.880 --> 00:32:05.920
new numbers. And maybe in a couple of years, maybe
589
00:32:05.940 --> 00:32:08.000
a little more than a couple of years, once the
590
00:32:08.039 --> 00:32:11.559
data comes in, we'll have a way of assessing kind
591
00:32:11.579 --> 00:32:14.759
of the full four years of Trump to the full
592
00:32:14.839 --> 00:32:19.140
four years of Biden and get a full picture of
593
00:32:19.519 --> 00:32:22.849
what the comparison was and the impacts on immigration. So
594
00:32:23.410 --> 00:32:26.200
Thank you, gentlemen, and we will obviously have you back
595
00:32:26.240 --> 00:32:29.079
in the future. And finally, I just wanted to draw
596
00:32:29.099 --> 00:32:31.619
your attention to a story in the Washington Post. We'll
597
00:32:31.640 --> 00:32:34.420
have a link to it. It's about the issue of
598
00:32:34.599 --> 00:32:40.440
third country deportations. And this is different from a similar
599
00:32:40.500 --> 00:32:44.529
thing like safe third country agreements, because this isn't about
600
00:32:45.329 --> 00:32:50.390
sending people to apply for asylum elsewhere. This is deporting
601
00:32:50.450 --> 00:32:55.829
people to countries not of their citizenship because their own
602
00:32:55.910 --> 00:33:01.170
country either won't take them or we've decided that there's
603
00:33:01.210 --> 00:33:04.289
a possibility they'd be tortured or for some other reason
604
00:33:04.349 --> 00:33:07.089
we don't want to return them to their home country,
605
00:33:07.170 --> 00:33:10.750
return them to other countries. This is something the Trump
606
00:33:10.789 --> 00:33:15.730
administration has pioneered. The authorization for it has always been
607
00:33:15.769 --> 00:33:19.759
in the law, but nobody ever did it before. And
608
00:33:19.880 --> 00:33:22.319
the Post story is actually a good update. It's got
609
00:33:22.339 --> 00:33:24.339
a lot of sob stories, the usual thing you would
610
00:33:24.380 --> 00:33:28.940
expect from the legacy media. But they reported that more
611
00:33:28.980 --> 00:33:33.880
than 25,000 people have now been deported to at least
612
00:33:33.880 --> 00:33:38.559
28 third countries. In other words, 28 countries have agreed
613
00:33:38.640 --> 00:33:42.700
to take at least some people who are not their
614
00:33:42.819 --> 00:33:46.299
citizens but are illegal immigrants in the United States. And
615
00:33:46.319 --> 00:33:50.559
this is really important. Because a lot of times there
616
00:33:50.599 --> 00:33:53.500
are people who have, say, committed crimes or in some
617
00:33:53.559 --> 00:33:56.980
other way made themselves deportable. But if their own country
618
00:33:57.480 --> 00:34:03.069
won't take them back, up to now, really, the reaction
619
00:34:03.089 --> 00:34:05.569
of the U.S. government has been to kind of shrug
620
00:34:05.630 --> 00:34:08.289
and say, oh, well, and just let them stay here,
621
00:34:08.349 --> 00:34:12.690
even though they're deportable. This is the first time, even
622
00:34:12.750 --> 00:34:15.719
under the first Trump administration, this didn't happen, at least
623
00:34:15.800 --> 00:34:20.510
on any significant level. where they're telling people, no, you
624
00:34:20.550 --> 00:34:24.309
don't get to just stay here if your own country
625
00:34:24.369 --> 00:34:27.510
won't take you back. Or, as in the case of
626
00:34:27.610 --> 00:34:31.690
the Maryland dad, Abrego, who got a lot of news,
627
00:34:31.750 --> 00:34:34.909
we've even talked about it some on this podcast, been
628
00:34:34.949 --> 00:34:38.179
determined by a judge that there's a likelihood he would
629
00:34:38.219 --> 00:34:42.300
be tortured if sent home. But that doesn't mean he
630
00:34:42.340 --> 00:34:45.139
just gets to stay. All that means is we can't
631
00:34:45.179 --> 00:34:49.329
deport him to that country. And so the administration has
632
00:34:49.369 --> 00:34:52.570
really cranked this up. There's a lot of obstacles. There's
633
00:34:52.610 --> 00:34:54.690
a lot of challenges to overcome. You have to get
634
00:34:54.929 --> 00:34:57.590
countries to agree to it. So often there's payments and
635
00:34:57.650 --> 00:35:00.590
stuff involved. There's a lot of litigation on this because
636
00:35:01.250 --> 00:35:04.909
the immigration lawyers want to subvert the enforcement of immigration
637
00:35:04.969 --> 00:35:09.269
law by any means possible. But the administration has persevered
638
00:35:09.949 --> 00:35:13.030
and has carried this out to a significant degree. And
639
00:35:13.090 --> 00:35:17.590
it's an extremely important thing both for the integrity of
640
00:35:17.650 --> 00:35:21.510
the immigration law, but also as a deterrent to people
641
00:35:21.590 --> 00:35:24.260
so that they realize if your own country won't take
642
00:35:24.300 --> 00:35:27.460
you back, that doesn't mean you're going to be able
643
00:35:27.500 --> 00:35:29.659
to stay here. We're going to send you to somewhere else,
644
00:35:30.239 --> 00:35:33.639
send you to Swaziland or Ghana or Mexico. Most of
645
00:35:33.659 --> 00:35:37.059
the people who've been returned to a country not of
646
00:35:37.099 --> 00:35:39.760
their citizenship, in other words, to a third country, have
647
00:35:39.780 --> 00:35:42.340
been sent to Mexico. A lot of them are Cubans
648
00:35:42.400 --> 00:35:46.110
or other Latin Americans, so they know the language. And
649
00:35:46.210 --> 00:35:50.050
Mexico is, you know, a perfectly functional country. But this
650
00:35:50.110 --> 00:35:53.559
is something that sends a message both to illegal immigrants
651
00:35:54.420 --> 00:35:58.840
and to countries around the world that we're not fooling
652
00:35:58.880 --> 00:36:02.239
around anymore, that coming into the United States and committing crimes,
653
00:36:02.659 --> 00:36:06.510
even just being here illegally without committing other crimes, is
654
00:36:06.550 --> 00:36:08.429
something we're not going to put up with. And we're
655
00:36:08.469 --> 00:36:11.269
going to do everything we can to remove you by
656
00:36:11.389 --> 00:36:15.920
any legal means necessary to The administration is sending that message,
657
00:36:16.179 --> 00:36:19.460
and it's long overdue, and it's good to see. So
658
00:36:19.500 --> 00:36:21.980
we'll have a link to the story. We may even
659
00:36:22.019 --> 00:36:24.380
do a podcast on it at some point on this
660
00:36:24.420 --> 00:36:27.289
whole issue of third country removals. But for now, the
661
00:36:27.329 --> 00:36:30.869
story is a good update. That's it for this episode
662
00:36:30.929 --> 00:36:35.150
of Parsing Immigration Policy. Thank you to Steve and Jason
663
00:36:35.210 --> 00:36:39.159
for walking us through the numbers without having to do
664
00:36:39.219 --> 00:36:42.750
too much math. Thanks to Brian Griffith, our producer, for
665
00:36:42.789 --> 00:36:44.909
making this thing work. And thanks to all of you
666
00:36:44.989 --> 00:36:47.340
for tuning in. I hope you'll tune in next week.