Who Dares To Hazard A Guess?

How many illegal immigrants are in the United States?

I asked that question in these pages in 2018 because for years and years I kept hearing the same number---that there were an estimated 11 million illegals in the United States.

That estimate did not make sense because we had seen a continuing flood of illegals crossing our border for several decades but the total number of illegals never budged.

Getting a reliable answer proved to be elusive.

Here is what the U.S. Census Bureau said about it on their website in 2018.

Do the data on the foreign born collected by the Census Bureau include unauthorized immigrants?

Yes. The U.S. Census Bureau collects data from all foreign born who participate in its censuses and surveys, regardless of legal status. Thus, unauthorized migrants are implicitly included in Census Bureau estimates of the total foreign-born population, although it is not possible to tabulate separate estimates of unauthorized migrants.

Interestingly, the Census Bureau is saying the same thing now that the 2020 census is complete but it no longer is stating " although it is not possible to tabulate the separate estimates of unauthorized migrants."

Nevertheless, the Census Bureau is still not providing us with any numbers of the illegals in the country.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Center for Immigration Studies provide an annual estimate but you can see from this chart they continue to keep coming back to that 11 million number year after year.

Source: https://cis.org/Report/Estimating-Illegal-Immigrant-Population-Using-Current-Population-Survey

 

In my blog post on this subject in 2018, I provided a chart that showed an estimate of the number of illegals in the country going back to the early 1990's based on estimates from the Pew Research Center.

Does anyone seriously believe that there were less illegal immigrants in the United States in 2022 than there were in 2006?

That is especially true when you look at the most recent statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection which shows that 4.2 million illegals have been encountered at the southern border since the beginning of 2021.

Source: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters

The numbers are shocking.

2020        646,822 encounters with illegals at the border

2021     1,956,519 (202% increase over 2020)

2022.    2,242,413 (through July- this equates to 3,363,320 for a full 12 months) (319% increase over '20)  

This has all occurred in the short 18 months since Donald Trump left office and Joe Biden took control.

If current trends continue until the end of the year, 5.3 million illegals will have entered the United States in the last two years.

If the 11 million number is correct (which I have previously stated I seriously doubt) this means the illegal immigration population will have expanded by almost 50% in two short years.

You have to also ask what this is going to look like in another two years, especially if economic, energy and food pressures in Central and South America become intense motivating more people to head towards the United States?

Let's put these numbers in context.

The first comprehensive immigration law regulating who was allowed into the country was not passed until 1891. It established an "Immigration Bureau" and directed it to enforce the immigration law.

These laws have been revisited a number of times since then but the long-standing principle was a limitation on the number of immigrants who could gain entry into the country. A numerical annual limit on the annual number of immigrants allowed to enter the country has been in place for over 100 

years.

Why have immigration laws at all?

The original reason was to protect American workers, their wages and the country's culture. These all hold true today but I would argue sustainability is now an equally important factor. Too many immigrants puts too much strain on our resources. Schools, hospitals, health care resources, roads, infrastructure, the environment. Adding too many immigrants, too quickly, also puts added pressure on the social order if those immigrant numbers outpace the ability to integrate and assimilate them into the general population.

The current immigration laws are generally tied to a framework that was passed in 1965 which gave preferences to those with family connections first, refugees and asylum seekers. Necessary job skills were also factors but these were less important than family ties. It also set numerical limits on where those immigrants came from placing specific limits on areas that had provided most of our previous immigration (e.g. Western and Eastern Europe) and favoring other parts of the world (Asia, Africa etc).

Interestingly, at the time of passage of the bill, Senator Edward Kennedy who was Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration said this,

"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." 

It did not quite turn out the way Senator Kennedy predicted.

The current U.S. immigration laws allowed only 740,000 persons to be granted permanent LEGAL immigration status in fiscal 2021 according to this DHS report.

Compare that to the almost 2 million that crossed the southern border in 2021 and were encountered by the Border Patrol. Undoubtedly, many, more snuck undetected across the border.

I need not remind you that all of this is in direct contravention of the laws of the United States.

We have laws that are supposed to limit the number of legal immigrants to under 1 million per year but we  turn a blind eye to another 3 million streaming across the southern border illegally?

This is the result when the  current executive branch of the United States is not only refusing to enforce the laws (which is their duty under the Constitution), but also seems to be actively encouraging this illegal immigration.

How many illegal immigrants are in the United States?

This apparently is a number that nobody in power is willing to reveal.

It also seems to be a subject that social media wants to keep under wraps.

In fact, Zero Hedge was recently suspended by Twitter for merely reporting the statistics above (with the addition of the number of illegals who crossed the border who were not detected by the Border Patrol as estimated by the Federation for American Immigration Reform).

Note that the suspension was for "hateful conduct". 

Is this because citing the statistic is "hateful'?

Perhaps it is because Twitter does not like the term "illegal alien".

However, that term has seemed fine to Webster's dictionary for a long, long time and was never considered "hateful" before

I don't know what the proper term to refer to the millions that are crossing are borders illegally and without documentation or authority is.

I would just like someone to give us a reliable number of how many illegal, unauthorized, undocumented aliens, immigrants, migrants or otherwise there are in the United States.

My guess is that it is a shocking number.

It is so big it undoubtedly would be judged hateful to even hazard a guess.