True Number of Illegal Alien Population Likely Three Times Higher Than Oft-Quoted “11 Million” Estimate

Commentary

Last week, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) claimed at a press conference last week that the country needs new immigrants to combat declining reproduction rates and a low population growth rate. 

Schumer said his “ultimate goal” was to help not only the so-called “dreamers,” but to “get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many,” illegal immigrants are living in the United States. This raises the question: Just how many illegal immigrants are there in the United States?

In reality, the number of illegal immigrants in this country is actually a multiple of the 11 million number that is frequently quoted by politicians. 

In fact, Democrats have been using this now-fictitious 11 million number for nearly 20 years. And during the intervening time period, illegal immigration has gotten worse, not better. Weak enforcement, porous borders, and ongoing effects from the passage of NAFTA have only exacerbated the issue. As has ongoing talk of future amnesty from Democrats in Congress, which serves as a magnet for migrants. And chain migration, which was enabled by the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, allows former illegal immigrants to sponsor their family members, causing massive demographic and cultural shifts.

Schumer has been pushing some sort of Amnesty program for illegal immigrants over the span of his entire 30-year career and his efforts go all the way back to 1984, when President Reagan was in office. At the time, Reagan stated during a presidential debate that “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though some time back they may have entered illegally.” 

Reagan’s comments paved the way for the disastrous Immigration and Control Act of 1986 which made any illegal immigrant who entered the United States before 1982 eligible for amnesty. 

It was Reagan’s greatest failure as a president. To be very clear, Reagan was well-intentioned—but he misjudged the trickery of the DNC. As author Daniel Horowitz noted in 2018, “Every bad outcome on immigration has emanated either from the unelected branches of government or legislation that was sold to the American people as doing the opposite of its actual intent.” 

The 1986 bill—which would become to be known as The Reagan Amnesty—was a sweeping immigration reform bill that was sold to the American public as a crackdown, a solution to what was even back then perceived as a border crisis. 

Under the bill, there was supposed to be tighter security at the Mexican border, and employers would face strict penalties for hiring undocumented workers. 

As the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) noted in 2021: “the path to citizenship was not automatic and supposedly contained several conditions: immigrants had to pay application fees, learn to speak English, understand American civics, pass a medical exam, and register for Military Selective Service. Illegal aliens with felony convictions or three or more misdemeanors were ineligible for amnesty.” Unfortunately, there was little enforcement of these requirements.

The single biggest flaw in Reagan’s Amnesty lay with those in Congress who had promoted the Act in the first place. While Reagan saw the 1986 deal as a compassionate solution to a pre-existing problem, members of Congress—particularly Democrats, along with some Republicans—saw it as an opportunity to gain voters. Once amnesty was enacted, members of Congress simply refused to implement the restrictions contained within the Act, preventing any real action to combat illegal immigration or the unauthorized hiring of illegal aliens by employers. 

Political advocacy groups also worked to undermine the enforcement of immigration laws. Leading these efforts in Congress were former Senator John McCain and Schumer. Reagan had been tricked and betrayed.

Indeed, illegal immigration quickly climbed to record levels after Reagan’s Amnesty, with the number of illegal immigrants more than doubling in the ten years following the passage of the 1986 Act. 

By 1996, illegal immigrants were estimated to be over 8 million—far exceeding the roughly 3 million illegal immigrants who were granted amnesty status in 1986. In early 2005, the left-leaning Pew Research Center came out with a new study whose stated intention was to estimate the numbers of “foreign-born persons living in the United States without proper authorization.” 

Pew’s study found that “the number of undocumented residents reached an estimated 10.3 million in March 2004 with undocumented Mexicans numbering 5.9 million or 57 percent of the total,” effectively validating official government numbers.

Here’s where things get a bit interesting. Rather than using a percentage increase, Pew settled on a static influx of immigrants of 485,000 per year. They did so by establishing a baseline number of 8.4 million immigrants based on an analysis of 2000 Census data—which was derived from a rather loose methodology. 

Pew then simply divided the difference between the 2000 estimate and their 2004 estimate, coming up with an estimated 485,000 illegal immigrants arriving per year. Despite their own historical data showing exponential growth in illegal immigrants, there was no accounting for any percentage increase. According to Pew, there was a simple, static number of illegals coming each year.

Using this rather simplified method, Pew determined that as of March 2005, the undocumented population had reached approximately 11 million including more than 6 million people from Mexico. The study found that most of these people had come to the country after 1990. The study also determined that about 80 to 85 percent of the migration from Mexico in recent years has been undocumented. 

Finally, the study found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the undocumented population lived in just eight states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona, Illinois, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

It is this extrapolated figure of 11 million illegal immigrants from Pew’s 2005 study that continues to be used by Democrats to this day—more than 17 years later. 

But interestingly enough, there was another detailed study (pdf) that was also done in 2005 by Bear Stearns Asset management. Right at the start, the study by Bear Stearns acknowledged what was widely accepted as fact: The accuracy of the official immigration statistics were widely regarded as incomplete.

Instead, The Bear Stearns study looked at things like school enrollments, demand for public services, foreign remittances, border crossings, and housing permits, noting that these other statistics “point to a far greater rate of change in the immigrant population than the census numbers.”

Bear Stearns found that in 2005, “the number of illegal immigrants in the United States may be as high as 20 million people,” more than double the official Census Bureau figure. The study found that “the total number of legalized immigrants entering the United States since 1990 has averaged 962,000 per year.” By way of contrast, Bear Stearns noted that “several credible studies indicate that the number of illegal entries has recently crept up to 3 million per year, triple the authorized figure.” 

The study rightly observed that “Illegal immigrants work very hard to conceal their identities and successfully avoid being counted” noting that “Census officials and academics underestimate the ingenuity and the efficiency of the communications network among immigrants.”

The Bear Stearns methodology—done for the benefit of its investors rather than political groups—seems to be based on more trustworthy, quantifiable data. We have another data point as well, a Yale Study from 2018. This study, which relied “on a range of demographic and immigration operations data,” found that there were as many as 29 million illegal immigrants, with an estimated mean of 22.1 million in the United States in 2018. 

As the study itself notes, they used an “extremely conservative model” to do “a sanity check on the existing number.” Like the Bear Stearns study, the Yale researchers note that “the survey method doesn’t effectively reach a group with incentives to stay undetected.” As one of the authors of the study noted, “What we’re saying is the number has been higher all along.”

Not to be outdone, the Pew Research Study decided to once again provide their own estimates of illegal immigrants—this time for the year 2017. Recall that Pew said there were roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in 2005—using a methodology I would politely describe as questionable. Bear Stearns said the number for 2005 was close to 20 million. Although it would require an extremely small growth rate, the 2018 Yale study effectively validated the Bear Stearns Study. In 2017, Pew found that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States had fallen from 2005 by half a million, to 10.5 million illegal immigrants. The study claimed that illegal immigrants had peaked at 12 million in 2007 and fallen steadily from there.

How did Pew arrive at such a low, counterintuitive number that contrasts dramatically with other studies? 

That question is hard to answer as the methodology used is somewhat indecipherable—something which Pew referred to as residual estimation methodology. The number of illegal immigrants was derived by taking the number of foreign-born U.S. residents and then subtracting the “estimated lawful Immigrant population.” In other words, they simply created the numbers.

Extrapolating between the 2005 Bear Stearns Study and the 2018 Yale Study—which found that the illegal immigrant population was as high as 29 million in 2018 using a model which its authors admit was based on an “extremely conservative” model, it would seem reasonable to say that the illegal immigration population was at least 30 million by 2020—probably higher. 

And while that number is admittedly nothing more than a rough guess, it’s a guess based on these underlying studies that validate each other, even if conservatively so. Moving forward, for the years 2020–2022, we actually have some data that it seems can be conservatively relied on. We know this because the numbers were based on data quietly released by the Biden administration late at night on Oct. 25.

According to FAIR’s analysis of the data, since President Joe Biden took office, around 5.5 million illegal aliens have crossed our borders, as FAIR notes, “a crisis of epic proportions.” To reach this number “FAIR’s figure contains the 4.4 million nationwide total reported by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as approximately 1.1 million ‘gotaways’ who have entered the country undetected per agency sources.” 

As Fair’s president Dan Stein noted: “We cannot even begin to reverse this disaster so long as our nation’s immigration policies are in the hands of someone who is bent on compounding it. No matter how late at night this administration releases data, the numbers still speak for themselves.”

We have the studies from Bear Stearns and Yale that validate each other and conform to what we have been seeing transpire at our borders. We also know that the methodology used in Pew’s 2017 study is highly questionable, so much so that it should be discarded from serious consideration. 

Does anyone actually believe the number of illegal immigrants in our country is now lower than in 2005? Pick whatever number you like, I think the number of illegal immigrants is probably in the 35–40 million range—but we can all agree that the 11 million figure touted by Democrats is utter nonsense. The thing is, they know that it’s nonsense. They also know that passage of a new amnesty would provide them with a huge influx to their voting base. 

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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