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The government’s household survey in January of this year showed the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.5 million, amounting to 15.8% of the total US population.
Both numbers are record highs in American history.
The record level of immigration has profound implications for taxpayers, schools, American workers, and our ability to assimilate so many people.
The public rightly senses this level of immigration is unsustainable, which is a key reason they elected Donald Trump.
Formally known as the Current Population Survey (CPS), the household survey in January is the first government survey to be weighted based on a new method developed by the Census Bureau to better reflect the recent surge in illegal immigration.
January’s figures breaks the prior record set in 1890, and reflects a significant change in the status quo. Just two years ago, the Census Bureau projected that the foreign-born would not reach 15.8% until 2042.
Evidence indicates something like 12 million new legal and illegal immigrants arrived during Biden’s four years. Because some immigrants already here die each year, and others go home, the net increase was “only” 8.3 million — larger than the individual populations of 38 states.
Illegal immigrants account for much of the recent growth. The Department of Homeland Security estimates illegal immigration by taking the number of legal immigrants in the country, a number we know reasonably well, and subtracting it from the total immigrant population recorded in government surveys.
The difference between these two numbers in January of 2025 was 15.4 million, an increase of 5.4 million (54%) compared to the January 2021 data.
Even if only a modest share of illegal immigrants are missed by the survey, the total population would be close to 16 million.
While the scale of illegal immigration was enormous in the last four years, legal immigration has been high for decades.
News articles about legal immigrants often focus on the difficulty of obtaining a visa, creating the impression that legal immigration is very limited. But most Americans do not realize that 71% (38 million) of all immigrants are here legally.
No government policy impacts virtually every aspect of American society the way immigration does.
In 2015, Pew Research estimated that legal and illegal immigrants, plus their descendants, added 72 million people to the US population since 1965. The number is closer to 90 million today.
Consider the impact on schools. The January 2025 data shows that 29% of school-age children in the US have an immigrant parent.
Even before the Biden surge, the average public-school student from an immigrant household lived in an area in which 39% of fellow students were also from an immigrant household.
One of the ways assimilation works is that a predominance of the native-born and their children make the absorption of English, along with other aspects of American culture and identity, almost inevitable for immigrants. But the scale of contemporary immigration changes this dynamic.
Immigration also has significant implications for American workers. In January of 2025, 20% of all workers were foreign born. Though many are skilled, most immigrant workers do not have a bachelor’s degree.
The increase in immigration since the 1960s has coincided with a steady increase in the share of US-born men (ages 16 to 64) without a bachelor’s degree not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work.
The percentage was 28% in January 2025, up from 20% in January 2000 and single digits in the 1960s. These individuals are not counted as unemployed because they are not actively looking for a job.
Immigration has almost certainly crowded out some Americans from the labor force. But perhaps more important, the availability of immigrant workers has allowed employers, policymakers, and much of the public to ignore the deterioration in male labor force participation.
After all, why care about this problem if there are eager immigrants to hire?
But we should care. Research shows that the increase in working-age men not in the labor force is associated with profound social problems, from crime and political alienation to overdose deaths and suicide.
Getting less-educated men into jobs will require, among other things, reform of the welfare and disability systems.
Reducing immigration and allowing wages to rise would certainly help. But as long as immigration stays high, there will be little incentive to address the problem.
The large share of immigrants with modest levels of education also adds significantly to the low-income population. Data from 2024 showed that more than one out of three children in poverty have an immigrant parent.
Providing welfare and other services to these low-income children, most of whom are US-born, comes at a significant cost to taxpayers.
Probably the most important reason to reduce immigration is to facilitate assimilation.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, himself the son of immigrants, said in 1915 that learning English and American customs is not enough.
He believed that “the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here.” He added that immigrants should be “brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations.”
Do any public figures today still believe this?
Many ordinary Americans are inclined toward Brandeis’s vision, but a huge fraction of our elites embraces identity-based politics, critical race theory and multiculturalism.
It is extremely unwise for a society that has a record foreign-born population and cannot even agree on what it wants from immigrants to continue high levels of immigration.
President Trump is right to want to control the border and enforce our immigration laws, but the failure to enforce the law is only part of the problem.
The fundamental problem is that policymakers never grapple with the sheer scale of immigration, legal or illegal. Thinking about immigration policy without regard to overall numbers is like budgeting without regard for how much money is being spent.
Immigration policy should be formulated with the best interest of the country in mind, with the absorption capacity of the nation the primary consideration.
Steven A. Camarota is Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies.