I mentioned the other day that I was curious about the net illegal immigration rate into the US. This would be (roughly) the number of border crossings minus repatriations and people going home of their own accord.
The Border Patrol doesn't provide anything like this, but there's a way of getting at it. Several organizations estimate the total size of the unauthorized immigrant population in the US, and the Migration Policy Institute recently gathered together the data through 2021 here. I took the average of the estimates and then plotted it against border encounters:
The total population of unauthorized immigrants barely changes at all in response to border crossings. In 2021, for example, the Border Patrol recorded 2 million border crossings but MPI estimates that the population of unauthorized immigrants increased by only 200,000. If you extrapolate this to 2023, we will end the year with a population of 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants, barely more than the average of the past 15 years.
Now, this extrapolation is a little dicey, but it really does seem as if net unauthorized immigration is close to zero thanks to repatriations, deportations, and voluntary departures. This, in turn, suggests that the level of illegal immigration isn't really tied much to national policy at all. Rather, it responds thermostatically to the demand for immigrant workers, going up when immigrant departures are high and going down when immigrant departures are low.
Long story short, American businesses want about 11 million unauthorized workers, and as long as that demand is there the population of unauthorized workers will hover around 11 million. The incoming flow of unauthorized immigration merely responds to changes in that population.
POSTSCRIPT: My theory will get a torture test when we get population data for 2022. Will it turn out that the population of unauthorized immigrants stays fairly steady in the face of a second year of 2+ million border crossings? Come back in a year and find out.
OT: Thought maybe you'd be interested in this tidbit from last week.
There are a lot of people playing with fire. WIV primarily used BSL-2 to perform these experiments, not BSL-3 and BSL-4. Danger, Will Robinson!
Don't feed the threadjacking troll.
As someone once told me, D_Ohrk_E1 isn't necessarily a troll. What he is is a crank. An Einstein Was Wrong type of crank.
+1
Sure, more crank than troll, but egregious thread hijacking is nonetheless trollish.
THANK YOU for pointing out that the "omg immigrants are swarming our borders!" line is not only false but actually WELCOMED by BUSINESS INTERESTS, who last I heard tend to support REPUBLICAN politicians.
Oh who am I kidding. The "border" issue is pure racism. A dependable Republican mainstay. They'll have their cheap labor AND they'll rile up the rubes too! It's not just deplorable; it's depraved.
Beware reductive fallacies. Jon Chait provides an eloquent warning against the type of perspective you appear to be advocating:
“To dismiss all actual or potential Trump supporters as incorrigible racists or white-adjacent or as the unwitting pawns of racists is to choose ideological purity over winning.”
In other words, if Dems want to win, they really can’t adopt the progressive line that the 70 million people who voted for trump are irredeemably evil. We will, in fact, need some of those votes. And winning some of those votes may actually involve listening to concerns about immigration rather than just dismissing such concerns out of hand.
This is the sort of analysis that should be in more Liberal media outlets (Chait writes for NY Mag); but, as far as I can tell, it’s actually tragically rare at such outlets.
At least since the outset of trump’s 2016 campaign, but certainly since the hysterical summer of 2020 when the Left engaged in so much self destructive behavior, Liberal media outlets have been in more of a self enclosed echo chamber than at any other time that I can personally remember.
It’s now common to see Liberal news outlets like NPR and the WP post DEI pages in which they swear their support for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In so doing, they publicly forswear their ostensible duty to provide as much of a neutral pursuit of the truth as they can (though a Leftist, of course, would likely assert that the concept of neutrality is just an expression of white supremacy).
These Liberal media outlets are publicly announcing that they are now dedicated to providing only one (far left) perspective on issues like equality, equity, merit, free speech, and discrimination. In so doing, they are becoming, if they have not already become, agents of further radicalization on the Left.
So Chait’s refreshingly honest dose of reality-based commentary, as quoted above, is certainly welcome and highly necessary. And I strongly advise taking it into consideration.
If your goal is to estimate net illegal immigration you can't be limited to those who cross the border without documents, you must also consider the number of people who entered the US legally and then overstayed their visa, since historically that is how a very large chunk of people in the US illegally got into the US.
You're 100% correct, but it's pretty unlikely the undocumented population estimates Kevin cites ("Several organizations estimate the total size of the unauthorized immigrant population in the US...") wouldn't take this into consideration.
Every estimate I've seen in recent years suggests the undocumented population of the US is somewhere in the general ballpark of 10-15 million. And yes, decent percentages of these people are visa-overstayers, (my guess is their share has been shrinking in recent years, given the increased rigor with which visa applications are screened post-Trump election—and arguably going all the way back to 911).
Most of the migrants crossing the border these days are claiming asylum and so are technically "authorized" to be here until their cases are heard in immigration court.
The problem is, that's not going to be for years in a lot of cases and then what are we going to do with potentially hundreds of thousands, if not eventually millions, of people who turn out not to have legitimate asylum claims (namely most of them) and are told to return home after having settled here and started new lives? It's going to be a complete shitshow.
The obvious answer is to allocate enough resources to immigration courts to deal with all the asylum claims in a timely manner. If you're right that most of those claims are not legitimate, dealing with them swiftly and deporting the bogus claimants swiftly could be expected to discourage people from making bogus claims, with the result that the remaining claims could be dealt with even more swiftly.
So which party is it that keeps trying to cut budgets even for things like immigration court that obviously need bigger budgets?
This blog should be renamed "Null Hypothesis," or "Nah - Not Really."
Kevin should use keystroke macros for the phrase "hasn't really changed all that much," and "isn't really."
That would be a totally kick-ass name! Not rejecting the null hypothesis is not a bad thing and this treating it as if it is really needs to stop toot sweet.
A couple of technical points related to the post and comments...
The estimates for 2021 from MPI are based on the American Community Survey (with appropriate adjustments for people not in the survey). Unfortunately, the ACS does not cover the whole year of 2021; ir really only covers the 1st half of 2021. Even then, it does not do a very good job of including the immigrants in the country for less than one year.
This means that the 2021 estimates do not include most of the "surge" at the southern border.
The initial data from the 2022 ACS implies a larger increase for 2021-22 than for previous years.
The MPI estimates (and other comparable data from the Pew Research Center and the Center for Migration Studies in NY) certainly take into account those added to the unauthorized population as visa overstays, not just those who cross the border illegally. )As jasper_in_boston replied to solar." In fact, over the last half of the 2010s, a significant majority of "new" unauthorized immigrants came from visa overstays, not clandestine entrants.
Finally, because of the way MPI and others define the unauthorized population, the asylum applicants are included as "unauthorized" not "authorized" as jte implies. The problem of the backlogs and delays in adjudication are quite serious as jte21 says but the numbers are part of the "unauthorized estimate" not in addition to it.
In fact, about 20% of the unauthorized immigrant population (more than 2 million folks) are not strictly "deportable" because they have a claim to being in the US and many are authorized to work. These include:
DACA (the so-called "Dreamers")
Temporary Protected Status
Asylum applicans
"The incoming flow of unauthorized immigration merely responds to changes in that population."
1. I guess the above is true IF the US desired and planned for an open border environment: the 'market' would achieve some type of equilibrium. Of course, legally and politically, I do not believe the US has an open border policy.
2. The quote has embedded, from my point of view, a fallacy. This analysis effectively assume the following two situations, 5 million undocumented immigrants enter and exit in a year and zero undocumented immigrants enter and exit in a year and zero, to be the same. I do not believe most Americans see my two examples as equal.
Argument doesn't really make sense because the primary reason illegal immigration is so heavily in the news (other than Trump constantly talking about it) is that there has been a huge transition in illegal immigrants from young males who quickly disappear in the system since they can easily support themselves to children and young mothers, who really can't support themselves in the short term.
If the number of unauthorized is mainly determined by the demand from US employers then that number should have gone down in the Great Recession and then gone back up, but the number has not really changed much. There was a slight decrease after 2007, but not much increase as unemployment in the US dropped from over 10% down to 3.5% (Figure 1 of the MPI link). Of course things were bad in other countries in the recession as well, which would have increased pressure for people to move to the US.
The constancy of the number has been a mystery in view of obvious increase in immigrants from some countries and mass attempts (at times) to cross the border. It may be somewhat fortuitous. The MPI report shows that the number of Mexicans has been decreasing, which at least partially balances the increase from other countries. The mass marches through Mexico from Central America and other places probably draw more media attention than a constant flow from Mexico itself.
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