For those of you who missed it over the weekend, here's a chart showing the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the US over the past 15 years:
This chart is based on consensus estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population. The final two years are my own (possibly iffy) projections based on the number of border encounters in 2022 and 2023.
Long story short: for all the hysteria over mobs of unauthorized immigrants on the southern border, their actual population in the US has barely changed at all. It's been hovering around 11 million for 15 years and so far shows little sign of changing.
They're there, they're just not "illegally" staying in the US despite the surge of border encounters.
I'm still not convinced on the issues of having a porous border and/or a loose immigration policy. Our population can, at this point, only grow by immigration.
They're all foreign, however many of them there may be.
What this country needs is more *American* immigrants!
Most of them are Americans. Just not United Statesians.
...and in the same period, the US population has increased from about 306 million to 340 million, so the unauthorized immigrant population has been steadily dropping as a fraction of the total population.
Sorry, I can't resist.
Have you adjusted for inflation?
I came to the comments just for this.
Thank you for saying what was on all of our minds.
So, you're saying that a person today is only worth 3/5 of a person in a bygone era?
Would love to see those numbers broken down into age, sex, and employment status. Then further into states, industries in which they are employed, marital status, and US born children.
In TrumpWorld, on the other hand ...
Why is it flat? We know there are illegal immigrants coming in, so why hasn't the number been rising? Possibilities:
People die.
People are becoming legal somehow.
People are learning how to disappear and/or estimates getting less accurate.
Maybe we don't count the illegal immigrants who leave, retiring in their home country?