The United States is experiencing the largest immigration surge in history under the Biden administration, outpacing the Ellis Island-era immigration boom that changed the face of the country forever, according to a shocking new analysis.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, an average of 2.4 million immigrants entered the United States annually from 2021 to 2024. According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, about 60% of immigrants entered the country illegally.
The total number of net immigrants under the Biden administration is expected to reach more than 8 million people, according to a New York Times analysis, compared to the number of new arrivals to the United States in the 1850s, when the proportion of foreign-born residents exploded. This is also outpacing the number of people entering the country.
Ira Melman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said: “For the past four years, we’ve been hearing from the administration that it doesn’t matter… and the American people know when they’re being lied to. ” he said. ) Advocacy groups.
“And that was probably one of the things that influenced the election.”
Experts say President Biden, who took office in 2021, sent a message that the U.S. welcomes asylum seekers, and that lenient catch-and-release policies at the border and lenient immigration courts are responsible for this massive increase. he accused.
“What Biden created on his first day was chaos,” Laura Reese, director of the Heritage Foundation Center on Border Security and Immigration, told the Post.
“He definitely opened the borders. He sent a signal loud and clear and the world responded to illegal activity,” she added.
Due to a surge in immigration, the population grew by 0.6% per year during this period. This is similar to the immigration that occurred during the Ellis Island era of the 1850s.
According to CBO and the U.S. Census Bureau, the foreign-born population of the United States now makes up 15.2% of the country, surpassing its all-time high of 14.8% in 1890, just two years before Ellis Island opened to handle the influx of immigrants. This is higher than a year ago.
But the exact scale of the surge is likely even larger than government data shows. That’s because it relies on the U.S. Census, which occurs once every 10 years. The census tends to receive fewer responses from immigrants concerned about their legal status.
Mellman, along with FAIR, said the toll of unchecked illegal immigration on such a large scale costs taxpayers more than $150 billion each year.
CBO estimates that Americans who did not attend college will see lower wage growth than expected in the coming years due to recent wage increases.
Much of the migrant surge can be attributed to the Biden administration’s loosening of strict policies put in place by President-elect Donald Trump, as well as an increase in asylum approval rates, which reached 52.6% in September 2023.
The United States began to see a significant increase in immigration in 2021 after the height of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employing 2 million people in the same year. Reported an encounter with a person.
Encounters soared to more than 2.3 million in 2021, reaching 3.3 million in 2022 and 2.3 million in 2023, according to CBP data.
That number was especially high in 2022, as people rushed to the border to try to enter the country ahead of an expected crackdown on immigration and asylum grants due to the expiration of President-elect Donald Trump’s Title 42 policy.
Unrest in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela also contributed to the growth in the U.S. immigrant population, with thousands fleeing their home countries in support of Biden’s pledge to welcome people fleeing danger and oppression.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy research at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said the immigration surge is disrupting nearly every aspect of American life for citizens and legal residents.
“I think there’s a lot of focus on the public safety and national security risks of this,” she told the Post.
“But what remains unsaid is the issue of labor market distortions and the impact this will have on Americans in communities that have had to take in all the immigrants, and to a lesser extent legal immigrants,” she added.
“And what I’m talking about is our schools, our health care system, our housing market, our job market are all under stress right now because of this.”
But history can repeat itself. President Trump has vowed to crack down on immigration and introduce mass deportations of people who entered the United States illegally.
After the immigration boom of the late 1800s, there was a massive backlash against immigration in the United States, and authorities passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration to the United States.
This law and other policies that excluded immigrants from certain areas led to a decades-long decline in America’s foreign-born population, before more inclusive policies were espoused under then-President Lyndon Johnson. It was abolished in 1965.
