Report: U.S. Immigrant Population Hits Record 46.6 Million

The U.S. population of legal immigrants and illegal migrants hit 46.6 million in January, up roughly 1.6 million since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, according to federal data posted by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The 46.6 million immigrants (legal and illegal) in the country in January 2022 is the largest number recorded in any government survey or decennial census going back to 1850,” the CIS says in a report released on February 23.

“As a share of the total population [of 332 million], immigrants were 14.2 percent — the highest percentage in 112 years. If present trends continue, the immigrant share is likely to surpass the all-time high reached in 1890 (14.8 percent) and 1910 (14.7 percent) in the next few years,” said the report.

“It is certainly the case that our legal immigration system … and the conscious decision to purposely not enforce immigration laws [against economic migrants], and to release hundreds of thousands of people into the United States, is now being reflected in these [January 2022] numbers,” said the CIS’s research director, Steve Camarota.

“In just the next few years, we’re going to pass the all-time high … America is headed into unknown uncharted territory,” he added.

The data shows that 70 percent —  or 1.1 million — of the new migrants are Latino, Camarota said.

Since January 2021, “it’s possible that 1.5 million [southern migrants] came in,” alongside additional legal immigrants and visa workers, he told Breitbart News. But that southern inflow is partially offset by the exit of other migrants, he added. Perhaps “three or four hundred thousand [migrants] went home. 100,000 got legal status, and 50,000 died,” he said.

But much of the population increase is caused by the administration’s push to expand migration via legal loopholes that blur the much-touted distinctions between legal and illegal migrants. For example, Biden’s deputies are admitting economic migrants via legally dubious doorways for asylum, parole, work permit, and family unification.

The doorways are being thrown open by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban refugee who was welcomed to California in the 1960s. Mayorkas and his pro-migration progressive deputies insist that Americans’ only homeland is actually a “Nation of Immigrants” and a “Nation of Welcome” for economic migrants.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gestures as he speaks at a press briefing at the White House on September 24, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

However, the public is becoming increasingly hostile to Biden’s administration’s migration policy, which is also quietly backed by many Republicans.

Migrants now comprise 14.2 percent of the population living in the United States, Camarota said. That share is roughly double the 1995 share of 7 percent when the non-diverse United States was building a middle-class society on a high-productivity economy,

During the low-migration period from 1924 to 1970, Americans’ inventions, productivity, and average wealth boomed. According to PBS, U.S. investors and companies conjured the television in 1927, frozen food in 1929, nylon in 1938, the first digital computer in 1939, the atomic bomb in 1945, suburbia in 1947, the first commercial computer in 1951, the polio vaccine in 1957, the idea for the Internet and the actual moon landing in 1969, the video game in 1972, and much more.

But in 2022, the increasingly diverse legal-and-illegal immigrant population of 46.6 million lives alongside 286 million Americans as it competes against Americans for jobs, housing, cultural clout, and diverse political priorities.

The competition had a huge impact on Americans’ wages, wealth, family formation, health, and society.

For example, amid the huge Biden inflow, home prices rose at a record 18.8 percent pace in 2021, pushing many young Americans away from homeownership in suburbia.  If that trend continues, many millions of ordinary Americans will not be able to build an economic nest egg to own a home. Instead, the rising value of homes — partly caused by rising migration — will be scooped up by wealthy Wall Street investors.

…and the steady future demand makes it attractive for Wall Street to buy, as well. Capital begets capital, and inequality increases. I’ve heard real estate professionals describe this as neo-feudalism.

— Andrew Good (@Drewbueno) February 20, 2022

Legislators, lobbyists, and officials in D.C. fight hard to preserve their policy of extraction migration because it boosts tax revenues for the U.S. government and provides a growing population of consumers for CEOs and Wall Street.

The 2021 population growth of 1.6 million shows Biden’s support for Washington’s economic policy of force-feeding the U.S. economy and stock market with money borrowed from banks and with legal and illegal migrants extracted from poor countries.

The economic strategy was outlined on January 21 by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a speech to the “Virtual Davos Agenda,” which was organized by the globalist World Economic Forum. The “modern supply side approach” seeks to expand the size of the economy with additional workers, productivity gains, and tax reforms, she said:

Labor supply has been a concern in the United States even before the pandemic, in part due to an aging population and in part due to a labor force participation rate that has trended downward over the past 20 years. Now COVID and declining immigration have further reduced the workforce …

Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.

Temporary agricultural migrant workers walk off a lettuce farm at the end of their shift outside Yuma, Arizona, on February 15, 2017. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

That economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.

Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.

The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.

An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of media-ignored polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.

NEW: Cheesecake Factory workers are exposing a shocking lack of safety, overwork & poverty wages.

Roark Capital, a private equity firm that controls 650K fast food workers, bought the chain in 2020.

Employees worked 12 hrs/day during the pandemic & were pressured to work sick. pic.twitter.com/Eh8fzKDdIF

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) January 28, 2022

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