Nearly 19 million illegal immigrants are present in the United States, according to an estimation from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
FAIR estimates that 18.6 illegal immigrants are in the U.S., an 11% increase since a June 2023 estimate. The number also marks a 28.2% increase over the four years of the Biden administration.
“The surge in illegal immigration was so large that the U.S. Census Bureau announced just three months ago it has changed its methodology for estimating the foreign-born population to account for it,” FAIR wrote in a news release accompanying the report. “By its own admission, between July 2021 and July 2022, the Census Bureau missed a net foreign migration of roughly 700,000 people, revising its estimate upward by nearly 70 percent, or from 1 million to 1.7 million.”
To estimate the number of illegal immigrants, FAIR calculated the “total number of native-born and foreign-born residents” using census information. “After excluding citizens at birth, naturalized citizens, permanent residents, and valid visa holders, we obtained a raw total of illegal aliens in the U.S.,” FAIR wrote in the report.
To address the undercounting of illegal immigrants, FAIR “split that raw total of the illegal alien population into two groups: those who came in during the Biden administration, and those who came in before.” The organization noted that “policy changes beginning in 2021 under the Biden administration led to the mass release of illegal aliens apprehended at the borders. These changes led to far more recent arrivals who are more likely to be undercounted, and the Census Bureau was initially unprepared for these events.”
FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement that “Americans have seen the impact of the illegal immigration crisis play out in their communities all across the country. This new report provides hard data on the enormity of the illegal immigration surge that took place as a result of policies put in place by the Biden administration.”
