Republicans (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Democrats) have given Americans the impression that we’ve been experiencing an “invasion” at our borders. But a new Pew Research Center report released Thursday not only shatters that myth but also reveals that the opposite is true. According to the report, the country’s unauthorized immigrant population peaked at 12.2 million in 2007, that is, when George W. Bush was president, and that population has been steadily decreasing since then. The Pew report found that the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States stood at 10.5 million in 2021, a 14% decrease from what it was in 2007.
The country’s unauthorized immigrant population peaked at 12.2 million in 2007, that is, when George W. Bush was president.
If those numbers shock you, then there’s a reason for it. Not a week goes by without somebody in the Republican Party promising mass deportations of unauthorized migrants. They can’t talk about the U.S. border with Mexico without falsely describing it as “open.”
Once proudly described as a nation of immigrants, the United States has become a nation of immigration enforcers thanks to Republicans making immigration a wedge issue that too many Democrats are afraid to challenge.
Republicans say that they don’t mind immigrants entering the country legally; they want to decrease the number coming in illegally. Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening.
Pew noted that at the same time the United States’ population of unauthorized immigrants dropped 14%, there was a 29% increase in what it calls the lawful immigrant population, and the number of naturalized U.S. citizens grew 49%. Of the 47 million foreign-born individuals living in the United States in 2021, the Pew report found, 23.1 million, slightly less than half, were naturalized citizens.
Those population estimates, according to Pew, “do not reflect changes that have occurred since apprehensions and expulsions of migrants along the…
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