What the Numbers Tell Us About the Recent Immigration Surge

During the 2024 presidential campaign, there was no issue on which the two parties and their candidates differed more dramatically in their presentation of the basic facts than immigration.

By and large, most Democrats adjudged the Biden administration as having dealt with a surge in migrants seeking admission on the southern border with a compassionate policy that avoided arbitrary deportations and family separations. Most Democrats also admitted the surge had become excessive, overwhelming the system for processing pleas for temporary or permanent legal status, and pointed to bipartisan legislation killed by congressional Republicans at Trump’s behest as offering (along with newly restrictive Biden administration policies) a way to pause the border surge.

Republicans, of course, led by Trump himself, painted a picture of a Democratic administration pursuing an “open borders” policy designed very consciously to generate illegal voting and remake the country’s demographics while producing a massive crime wave and a major drain on public resources.

While it’s clear inflation and the economy were bigger factors than immigration in fueling Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, Trump did fan already existing public concerns about levels of new border crossings and their potential fallout, and there is zero question he and his congressional allies will prioritize big changes in immigration law and its enforcement. In preparation for this new era of revived American nativism, the New York Times has published an authoritative (albeit in some cases based on informed estimates) set of statistics documenting what’s really been happening on the immigration front during the last few years. These numbers help separate myth from reality as the passions of the campaign yield to actual policymaking.

The Times compilation does indeed show that an unprecedented surge of immigration (legal and illegal) occurred during the Biden presidency — higher than what the U.S. experienced before the infamous Immigration Act of 1924 instituted an overtly racist system of highly restrictive quotas based on national origin:

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.

Cumulatively, the estimated 8 million new arrivals during the Biden years have raised the percentage of people in the country born elsewhere to 15.2 percent, higher than the 14.8 percent recorded in 1890 at the peak of the 19th-century immigration wave.

The Times cites a Goldman Sachs analysis that estimates 60 percent of the immigrants entering the U.S. since 2021 had no legal documentation. So it’s fair to say complaints about a surge of illegal immigration during the Biden administration were justified.

Were Biden policies the principal cause of this surge, or was it attributable primarily to forces beyond the administration’s control? After looking at the trends and their timing, the Times concludes that while external and internal factors contributed to the uptick in immigration, Biden policies were indeed a big deal:

Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach. “We’re a nation that says, ‘If you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come,’” Mr. Biden said during his 2020 presidential campaign.

After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States. Some have received temporary legal status while their cases wend through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.

Indeed, for the Times, the proof of official responsibility for the surge was the dramatic drop (basically to levels experienced during the Trump administration) in border crossings once these policies were changed in June 2024.

Beyond these data points, though, the Trump case for an engineered immigration crisis doesn’t hold much water. There is no evidence (and much evidence to the contrary) that immigrants (legal or illegal) commit crimes at a level higher than native-born American citizens. As for the idea of a nefarious (albeit never, ever documented) plot to deploy illegal immigrants as equally illegal voters for the Democratic ticket, GOP gains in the very areas where migrants have recently appeared in large numbers show this simply did not happen to any significant extent:

Some of the biggest effects have occurred in South Texas, and Mr. Trump made big electoral gains there. Eight years ago, he won less than 30 percent of the vote in a strip of six counties along the Rio Grande. This year, he won all six counties.

Trump generally improved on his 2020 performance in a lot of states with high levels of immigration, including Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. If there was a Democratic plot to harvest illegal votes from migrants, it dismally failed.

Overall, while Team Trump’s suggestion that it’s time for a reset of U.S. immigration policies because border crossings are overwhelming the system makes abundant good sense, there’s no clear evidence the immigration surge is creating the scary consequences the candidate and his party talked about so much during the campaign. So if Republicans do radically change existing policies, it’s likely it will represent a major bait-and-switch initiative in which legitimate concerns are used to create the conditions for a return to 1924-style nativism.