ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Many Immigrants Have Left the Country?
About a month ago, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference to announce that about “1.6 million illegal immigrants have left the United States population.”
That’s a fraction of the number of people who arrived in the years that the Biden administration essentially opened the border. But it’s a lot of people, and it engendered much eye-rolling among journalists who compared Noem’s claim to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s declaration that President Trump’s drug interdiction policies had saved 258 million lives, roughly 75% of the U.S. total population.
However, in the weeks since Noem’s announcement, several data points have come in that suggest her estimate may be reasonably accurate. It might even be too low.
In August, the Pew Foundation released an estimate that the foreign-born population in the U.S. declined from 53.3 million at the beginning of the year to 51.9 million by the end of June – a decline of 1.4 million in just six months. The Pew report notes that the January count of 53.3 million was “the largest number ever recorded,” and that the decline this year will be the first decline in the immigrant population since the 1960s.
About the same time, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that the foreign-born population fell by 2.2 million in the first seven months of the year. CIS estimates that 1.6 million of those who left were in the country illegally. If this estimate is correct, it would indicate that about 600,000 immigrants left, despite having the option legally to stay.
The CIS report indicates that it relied in part on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks the number of foreign-born workers. The BLS data show that the number of foreign-born workers peaked in March at 32.2 million, before falling to 30.8 million by August – a decline of 1.4 million. Even so, the level remains historically high, and numbers appeared to stabilize in late summer.
There’s a long way to go, but what’s been achieved in eight months is impressive.