The Illegal Alien Population

FAIR's Spencer Raley, Madison McQueen, and Jason Pena of the research department talk about their updated report on the population of illegal aliens residing in the U.S., how they reach this estimate, and how this number affects jobs, spending, education, and public safety.

Show Notes

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Intro: Today on Understanding Immigration, the illegal alien population.

Spencer:
All right welcome back to another episode of FAIR's Understanding Immigration podcast. This is Spencer Raley, FAIR’s Director of Research and today we have a little bit of a different episode for you. Matthew Tragesser and Preston Huennekens are taking some well-deserved time off for the holidays so, in their place joining me today are Madison McQueen and Jason Pina, both from my research team. Almost every year FAIR releases an updated estimate of the total illegal alien population that currently resides in the United States and we're actually in the process of finalizing and releasing our 2020 update to this study. So, in today's episode we want to take you behind the scenes and give you a more in-depth look at the illegal alien population in the United States both today and in the past and just a little bit of a view of what that might look like in the future, especially under the incoming presidential administration. So, let's go ahead and jump right into this, Jason we're going to start with you how many illegal aliens are in the United States today, as of our latest update that should be released in the next week or two, and how does that compare to 2019 and the years before that?

Jason:
For sure, Spencer, thanks for having us. So, the FAIR 2020 estimate of the illegal alien population is at 14.5 million. Now, compared to 2019 which was set at 14.3 million the United States witnessed a 200,000 increase of illegal aliens residing in the United States. So, one of the reasons why it grew slower as opposed to other years is the coronavirus that occurred earlier on in the year under the under the Trump administration, we saw that President Trump had closed non-essential travel with Mexico and Canada so that curtailed some of the visa entries illegal border crossing entries from coming into the United States. Moreover, we saw that with migrants seeking asylum, or trying to file a claim we had the MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols), otherwise known as Remain in Mexico Protocols that were occurring, so thanks to that arrangement, along with the safe third country agreements with the Northern Triangle we were able to experience less economic migrants coming in here for financial gain and subsequently disappearing into the interior if they were to file an asylum claim. So, when we look at the adult illegal alien population through all 50 states, it accumulates to 14 million total as I said earlier, but when it comes to the U.S. born children of illegal aliens it is 19.4 million. Now, when we have the illegal alien adult population of itself that's problematic, but when we introduce the either U.S. born children that exacerbates the problem because now these children are eligible for welfare programs such as SNAP, WIC, all the rest of it.

Spencer:
Yeah, that's a really good point, Jason. A lot of times we look at our illegal alien estimates. For FAIR, we actually when we look at our cost estimates we include the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens as well because their costs are a direct result of their families, their parents coming to the United States illegally so we include those costs here. We don't always, we don't include them as illegal aliens in our population estimates. I think it's very important to bring that up that there are closer to 19 and a half million illegal aliens and their U.S. born children in the United States with that. Maybe break down a little bit just how the how illegal aliens come to be in the United States. That's something that I think we often overlook some people may just have this picture of everyone coming across the border the southern border in order to get the United States, but you've also got the issue of visa overstays, people coming across the northern border, issues like that, over violating the terms of their visa and then not leaving as ordered, so maybe try to break some of that population down just a little bit for us.

Jason:
Definitely, as you said, when people think of illegal immigration people think of an illegal border crosser. Not many people know that 60% of the illegal alien population is due to visa overstays while the remaining 40% are because of somebody who stuck into our country illegally whether through the southern or northern border which causes the larger levels of the illegal alien population to grow thanks to the Trump administration putting travel restrictions on for people for foreign nationals coming to the country. That's helped slow down the illegal alien population from expanding.

Spencer:
Yeah, and I think that's a really good point and something you touched on that I want to just draw on a little bit further, is the impact that COVID-19 has had on the illegal alien population growing at a slower than expected rate this past year. For the last number of years, you had seen the illegal alien population, according to FAIR anyway, growing at a pretty significant rate. For example, in 2010, you saw there were approximately 11-11.2 million illegal aliens in the United States, by 2016 that number had bloomed over 12.5 million, by 2019 last year we saw it at 14.3 million and by our estimates it's only grown, I mean “only” as a relative term, it's still a large population, it's grown by approximately 200,000 in the last year. And a big reason for that is COVID-19 travel restrictions and of course economic issues. And part of that is, with fewer migrants being allowed to come to the United States you touch a little bit on the travel bans that were actually expanded to include most foreign countries. You've seen fewer migrants coming to the United States on visa and since fewer coming in on a visa, they have they don't have that opportunity to then overstay that visa. And of course, a lot of the lower income job opportunities that illegal aliens often flock to have been the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, so there are fewer opportunities available there. So fewer illegal aliens are trying to come into the United States and work those jobs. And because of that, you see a lower-than-average number coming into the United States just over the last year. Of course, that doesn't mean just because the impact has only grown by a little bit that it's still not having a severe impact of Americans, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, so I want to send it over to you Madison and just tell us a little bit about the fiscal and the social impact that the illegal immigration population is having on America right now.

Madison:
Well, we estimate that illegal aliens are costing U.S. taxpayers about a net fiscal impact of at least 133.7 billion dollars annually. And that's an increase of about 2 billion dollars just within the last year which is huge, considering that we did have a decrease this year or a slower rise for illegal immigration than what we previously expected. Now, that's including both federal costs and state and local costs and, so it's pretty self-evident that illegal aliens are a net drain on the economy regardless of how much money they pay in taxes, because that's often the argument, of “oh well illegal aliens pay taxes, they're contributing,” but the U.S. only recoups about 14 percent of the amount that we're spending on illegal aliens annually. Now federal, state, and local governments are not collecting enough taxes to cover the costs of the services that this massive illegal alien population is consuming. Now, this affects different states based on population size, but no matter how big of the population that illegal aliens are in that state it still has a massive impact. For example, in California, they have the largest share of illegal aliens with over 3 million in their state. If we were to take into account illegal aliens and their U.S. born children, that number becomes about 4 million people who are adding to this net cost on taxpayers for the services ranging from education and medical costs, to welfare, and other state and local expenditures. So, the average cost to California taxpayers is about $8,707 per illegal alien, per year. That's a huge amount of money. And then, so we looked at a big state, but if you take into some of these states who don't have huge numbers of illegal aliens, it still largely affects them. The 10 states with smallest immigrant populations are New Hampshire, Mississippi, Alaska, Maine, North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Vermont, Montana, and Wyoming, and between those 10 states there's about 415,000 foreign-born people and about 21 percent or 88,000 people of that total are unlawfully present in the United States. And while that's a lot lower than what we see in California, that’s still 454 million dollars that these states are paying annually because of illegal immigration in their state. And in addition, I mean each illegal alien is consuming about $4,500 to $6,000 in services that aren't covered by tax payments, so that money is having to come out of other social programs that people like veterans and disabled Americans are depending on. And not only that but many of these states there's already economic depression and so Americans are competing for these jobs with adult immigrants who often have very limited English proficiency and often are lower skilled, but there's still higher competition. And so, this is extremely evident when we look at falling wages in agriculture business farmers have become increasingly dependent on cheap foreign labor through the H-2A visas, and also illegal aliens who are willing to work longer days for less money. And as a result, wages in that field have dropped by 20 percent. That's a huge amount for really rough labor and the same amount goes for other industries as well. We're seeing this with STEM, that these large companies and corporations would rather turn to foreign-born labor through H-1B visas instead of investing in qualified local workers.

Spencer:
Madison, I want to just jump I just want to jump in there for a brief second just highlight that point. You're looking at wages falling by a significant amount in these industries and just, imagine if whether you came into work tomorrow or over the next six months or whatever you're or even over the next few years your wage fell 20%. If someone was earning even if you say you had a really healthy salary of a $100,000, that'd be a $20,000 decrease. You're making $50,000, that's $10,000 that's a lot of money. And it's easy, I think sometimes, to get lost in some of the broad statistics with this. All three of us work in statistics here at FAIR, so, but it's just mind-boggling when you try to just sit down and put it in perspective. The massive impact is having even on a state when you look at California and there are millions of illegal aliens in that state, then you look at a state like Montana that just might have between five and eight thousand illegal aliens, you think, “oh well, it's not nearly as big of an issue there,” but of course the scale is a lot smaller, and the biggest industries in states like Montana end up being things like agriculture, forestry, things like that where these illegal aliens are really trying to take advantage of that. They're willing to work for far less, they pretty much have to be willing to work for far less, what that ends up doing is it depresses the wages for the other people who live in that state and rely on those industries, so sorry I just want to jump in there and highlight that.

Madison:
No, that's great, yeah so definitely I mean there's huge competition. And what does that say about the businesses who are doing this? That they would rather pay less money and to disadvantage everyone but themselves just for a higher profit margin, I mean it's not good. We would be upset if that happened to us so why are we allowing this to happen to other people? And even then, I mean they're making more money than they would in their home countries, but it's still less than an American would make.

Spencer:
And of course you have to understand that when you come to the United States, it might be more they're making their home countries, but there are higher costs in some aspects of living in the United States as well, so they're still very happy to come to the United States and take those jobs because it's far more than what they're making in their home country, but at the same time it continues to depress the wages. And we're not going to get into in this podcast, but this is also rampant in some of the lawful immigration areas, such as your H-1B visa workers where workers are often tied to one employer, they don't have the opportunity to compete in the market, so if that employer wants to underpay them, they don't have much of a choice but to accept it. So it's really an issue across the board, but we see it especially in the illegal immigration issue here because you're talking about people who aren't supposed to be in the United States in the first place, so again they can't just jump into the economy and compete at the level that most Americans would, and they're more than happy to take a lower wage because one, it’s still more what they made in their home country, but that impact of course drags down wages for those that are either born here in the United States or even more importantly those who came here the right way hoping to receive a fair market wage in the United States and chase that American dream.

Madison:
Absolutely, well switching gears here a little bit talking about the social impact of illegal immigration, if we break down the demographics of illegal aliens entering the U.S., it paints a very different picture than that of what open borders advocates are trying to paint of this family who just wants a better life. And while yes, that might be the case for some, it's a much smaller population than they would like us to believe. Talking about crime. so illegal aliens are four times more likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens and three times more likely to be incarcerated than lawfully present migrants, so that's a huge impact again going back to the fiscal cost on our judicial system, on the prison systems, on police, all these other systems that are being affected that then are not getting the tax revenue to then support the added efforts that are having to go into protecting and enforcing laws. In fiscal year 2019, more than 86 percent of all ICE arrests had prior criminal convictions. These criminal convictions range from assault and battery, to domestic violence, to sex offenses, theft, and murder. That's pretty large and the separate issue of sanctuary jurisdictions and the effects that has on our communities because they are released and not turned over to ICE. So, looking at how many more slipped to the cracks that got released and haven't been able to be arrested by ICE and then deported, and also 82.9 percent of those arrests additionally already had re-entered after being deported once. So, you're looking again, here's more costs that are going into having to enforce, and this is while we've had a president who wants to enforce immigration. I can only imagine what it's going to look like when we have an administration that's anti-immigration enforcement. What are these costs going to ensue and how will that affect not only fiscal impact, federally ,and state and locally but our police and our education systems? How is this going to affect us when we continue to get laxer on our enforcement levels?

Spencer:
Yeah those are really good points and it really just in my mind anyway, highlights how this goes far beyond the narrative that you often see portrayed in the media, which is that these are people who are simply looking for a better life, and again that does make up a large portion of illegal aliens, but there is a massive impact that goes beyond just, “their only crime is that they crossed in the United States illegally,” which as we've seen, is not accurate in the slightest. There are a wide array of people that are trying to enter the United States. First of all, you've got gang members, we've recently touched on that in another podcast in this series and the significant impact that has on the United States, you've also got other criminal actors who are coming into the United States trying to, whether it's smuggling drugs, or smuggling humans, or any other issue like that, coming into the United States as well. And what we have found in our research is also that when someone is willing to look at a law that a country has here in the United States regarding immigration and say, “oh it's all right if I break that,” they're going to be just as likely to break other laws as well if they feel like they don't like them, or that they're not just, or this isn't like a law I had in my home country. And we see that reflective in the statistics that we publish about the likelihood of illegal aliens being incarcerated or committing a crime and what that really comes down, because we don't see, and just to highlight, we don't see that translating to lawful migrants, we don't see that translating necessarily to people who come from a particular country, because a lot of our detractors like to say, “oh you only highlight those issues because you're racist and because you hate immigrants,” well that's not true, that's not true in the slightest and it never has been. The truth of the matter is, we found that people who are willing to break the law on small things, whether they're U.S. citizens, whether they're born here, no matter what race or creed they are, they're going to be more likely to do that and more serious issues as well, if they feel like they're put into that situation, and again we have not seen that to be true for those that follow the law when they come to the United States. So that those are very important points to detail about the illegal alien population in the United States and you can expect that to grow proportionally if the incoming administration indeed does not prioritize allowing law enforcement to enforce our immigration laws. Now, one of the, just shifting gears here a little bit, one of the most common questions we get when we release a new illegal alien population estimate is simply, “How do you come to this figure?” because every organization has their own figure, it seems like a different figure. FAIR tends to kind of fall somewhere in the middle. There are some organizations that have estimated the illegal alien population to be as high as 20 million, there's some that think it's under 10 million, so we come to this figure using a similar base to other organizations, which is we look at census data, especially from the American Community Survey, and we look at the questions that are asked in that survey to determine how many lawful migrants are in the United States versus how many people identify themselves as foreign-born. So when you subtract the lawful migrants from the foreign born, you get this base number that gives you an idea of how many people might be in the United States illegally. Of course, there's an issue with that because illegal aliens have a very vested interest in not telling agents of the federal government, “hey I'm in the country illegally,” or even giving them a hint to it by saying that you're foreign born, most just won't even, many anyway, won't even respond to census data and of course, census officials try to make up for that by contacting them via other means, or having some online submission forms, but that doesn't come to fruition either. And this is where you see a lot of organizations that have mass immigration leanings or biases, will try to say, “oh well this is what the Census Bureau says,” or suggests, they don't try to take a position on that, this is what they suggest, their data suggests, so we're just going to assume that number is accurate that the illegal alien population is 9 million or 10 million or something like that. In the past, before the immigration issue became such a hot button topic, and believe it or not, once upon a time, it was a little more bipartisan. Most of these organizations agreed that was approximately 20 to 30 percent and some as high as 40 percent under count, and so FAIR still follows these historical assumptions in creating our calculation, and that that brings our figure up when you look at that, and then if you look at some of the differences between inflow and outflow. In other words, how many people that border patrol believes slips through the cracks, evades their efforts and makes it successful in the United States, or how many people the federal government believes overstays their visa in any given year, compared against the number of apprehensions and deportations by border patrol and ICE, you get the next part of your figure, which that difference would be how many new illegal aliens you've had come into the United States in recent years, and of course you also have to look at issues such as those who left voluntarily or left the country just to go back to their country of origin to or to another country to pursue another opportunity. So, we take all that together, we come out with our estimate, which is roughly 14.5 million illegal aliens the end of 2020. This is not a perfect science, and I think it's important to really note that anyone who tries to tell you, “we know the number is x,” you can just dismiss that, because there is no federal government database of illegal immigration. The government only loosely tracks how many lawful migrants are in the United States, we don't even have a firm figure on how many immigrants are in the United States right now, which is a big problem that could be solved by a number of things such as implementing biometric entry/exit, but again that's a different topic for a different podcast, so if you asked me to put my money on our figure being too high or too low, I would bet that we are very close, but we do intentionally err on the conservative side with some of our figures, to avoid as much speculation as possible. So, the argument could very well be made that the actual figure is a little higher than what we estimate. I can't think of any situation where it would actually be lower. However, this could change a lot. We've got a new presidential administration coming in and as Jason had mentioned, thanks to the efforts by the Trump administration, of course the impacts of COVID-19, the illegal alien population actually grew less than we expected this past year, but now you've got a COVID-19 vaccine on the horizon, it's reason to assume that this trend will reverse due to that and due to the fact that President-elect Biden has promised to undo everything that president Trump has done to combat the growth of illegal immigration in this country. But it's gonna be interesting because he's also promised to grant amnesty to most, if not all illegal aliens in this country, including many of those who have criminal convictions. And if this happens, of course the illegal alien population will decrease since those illegal aliens will have legal status, but that doesn't, and just because you give millions of people status in the United States, it doesn't stem the impact that they have on this country, it's not going to make the crime rate necessarily among illegal aliens go down suddenly. It's not going to make their fiscal impact completely disappear, in fact, it's likely that their fiscal impact is going to go up because they're suddenly going to be eligible for a lot of different government programs, a lot of different welfare programs, and that sort of thing, but I highly doubt you're going to have an employer go, “oh hey, you got legal status now, so I'm going to give you a 20 or 30% pay raise. So many of these many of these migrants are going to be making the same amount of money, but their costs are going to go up, so it's actually going to hit the pocketbooks of Americans even harder. So, I wanted to see what both of y'all thought of this, so looking into the future and into the past, especially considering a promise of amnesty by the Biden administration, coupled with hopefully the COVID-19 situation improving in the near future, what is the future of illegal immigration in the United States and how can we look at the past to give us a clue about how this trend might be in the future?

Madison:
Well like we saw with the Reagan amnesty in 1986, a promise of amnesty always brings a massive wave of illegal aliens to the border. In fact 1980s set many records as a top immigration decade at that point in time and even though a lot of these times, there's sanctions placed on these amnesties, those sanctions are rarely enforced. So, you have a promise of quote, unquote “citizenship” or “path to citizenship” and no enforcement of the sanctions or other requirements that come along with that, and so we can expect, not only while, yes, the number of illegal aliens technically will decrease, we can see a huge wave of illegal immigrants coming to our border with hopes of another amnesty in the future. And so, I think in our past studies, we've estimated that to be an additional 20 plus million immigrants that are going to come to our border and try to come in illegally to get these benefits, especially if the Biden administration, like they've already kind of hinted at, they want an open border situation. And leaning towards the side of anti-immigration enforcement, I just see this skyrocketing even higher to what we've estimated in the past. And that's not even including the immigrants that are going to come through visas and all of these extended programs that his administration has proposed.

Jason:
No, absolutely Madison. One thing that the Biden administration has alluded to, as you and Spencer have mentioned earlier in the podcast, is dismantling the safe third country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and as well as the Remain in Mexico Protocols. We're already seeing a rising border surge and President-elect Biden hasn't occupied the white house yet. We can only imagine how that'll be once he's in there, full throttle, taking the reins of immigration enforcement, which he has indicated that he's gonna downgrade, which is a disappointment for blue-collar Americans. One thing that we saw with the Mississippi raids last summer, was that many of the illegal aliens that were arrested and subsequently deported was, it opened up many jobs for the local population there. Many didn't have a high school education or a basic skill set to do those jobs, and it benefited them. Now that even worksite enforcement is going to be over, I mean it's definitely going to impact those blue-collar Americans who are looking for jobs as we're coming back from this strained labor market. Moreover, I predict that we'd see a lot more migrant caravans coming in from central America. Last year actually, in terms of national security, an intelligence agency in El Salvador had confirmed the presence of criminal aliens in these migrant caravans and the representative had mentioned how many of these criminals would disguise themselves as law-abiding migrants just trying to make their way north, when in reality many of them had rap sheets ranging from homicide, terrorism, kidnapping, you name it, they had it. Many of them were MS-13 and 18th Street Gang members, so that's something to be on the lookout for, is in making sure we don't have national security threats or criminals entering reporters, in that regard.

Spencer:
Yeah absolutely, those are both very good points. I pulled up the, just some of the past illegal alien figures in the United States, the Reagan amnesty took place there in the later 80s, and around that time the illegal alien population was estimated to be about 3 million, after that amnesty. And just over the next decade you saw that grow from 3 million to 9 million and then by the mid-2000s up to over 12 million. Now we estimate that figure to be over 14 million, and so like you mentioned Madison, that spurred a massive wave of future illegal immigration. So those fiscal and social issues like Jason touched on, still existed even though they were granted amnesty, but then you had a whole new wave of illegal immigration making its way to the United States because they heard that amnesty was being given out. And if it happened once, it's going to happen again, and they're right! Because now we've seen limited forms of amnesties and quasi-amnesties, like DACA which is not an amnesty, but offered deferred deportation status and work authorization, and that stemmed more illegal immigration. And so while we might see the official number go from 15 million down to a couple million or even zero, I think you're gonna see that figure just suddenly, it's just gonna start going right back up again, because all we're doing is putting up a big incentive for everyone to come to the United States. If you can get here, you're eventually going to get some sort of status, this administration is not going to try to prioritize American citizens and lawful migrants over illegal aliens by enforcing our immigration laws. It's just going to turn into a wild west of trying to enter the United States, and that's not good, obviously for American citizens and lawful migrants in their social and economic prospects here in the United States, it's also not good for countries like Mexico, which have to deal with these massive migrant caravans and less than savory characters who are trying to take advantage of those caravans and also to transport illegal aliens and illicit cargo from other countries in central America or even flying from other countries in Europe or other continents to a country like Mexico or even Canada, and then trying to illegally migrate into the United States. So I think it's clear you really don't even have to dig too deep into the evidence to see that this is going to have a significant negative impact on the United States and FAIR has released a report, the three of us released a report recently called “By the Numbers” that looks at the tangible and specific impacts that these proposed changes, these proposed amnesties and reductions in immigration enforcement would have on the United States. All right, well I think that's a great spot to close. We hope that you've enjoyed today's episode and perhaps learned something new about the composition of the illegal alien population in the United States. As always, we'll be releasing a new episode every other Monday. Our episodes are available on most streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. You can also visit our website www.FAIRus.org and our Twitter handle @FAIRImmigration to access podcast episodes. So please subscribe and spread the word to your friends and family. We hope each and every one of you had a great holiday season and we certainly wish everyone a fantastic 2021. Until next time, this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.