Biden’s border surge drives U.S. to new record with highest-ever share of immigrants

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Immigrants now make up 15% of the U.S. population, the highest share in history, breaking records established more than a century ago, according to a report.

The Center for Immigration Studies, citing Census Bureau statistics, says 49.5 million immigrants — both legal and illegal — are residing in the country.

The number is rapidly rising, with a net of 4.5 million immigrants settling since January 2021, when President Biden took office. That is equivalent to the entire population of Oregon or Oklahoma in just 34 months.

Of those, more than half are illegal immigrants, the study concluded.

The U.S. wasn’t supposed to break the record until 2033, according to the Census Bureau’s projections from a few weeks back. The Biden migrant surge, along with a rise in death rates and a drop in birthrates in the U.S., has upended the demographics, said Steven A. Camarota, a demographer and lead author of the report, released Thursday.

“We are in uncharted territory on immigration,” said Mr. Camarota, pointing to big debates about how much immigration the U.S. can handle.

He said the milestone should raise questions about the pace of the increase, the overall level of immigration and whether it will reach a point at which it has gone too far or too fast.

The previous record for the share of immigrants in the population was set in the 1890 census, when it was 14.8%. Twenty years later, in 1910, the country almost equaled that with 14.7%.

The share dropped over the next 60 years, bottoming at 4.7% in 1970 before an upswing to today’s record.

Immigration rights advocates often point to the late 1800s and early 1900s as evidence that the U.S. can handle high immigration levels.

Mr. Camarota said those arguments wear thin now that the U.S. has topped those levels and shows no sign of slowing down. He said the immigration landscape is very different, with modern terrorism concerns, the implications of a large welfare state and changing assumptions about a duty to assimilate.

“If you want to make the case to bring more people, you have to at least acknowledge that and say the past is no guide here,” he said. “You might say this is all positive, that’s fine. But what you can’t say is it is similar to the past. All these things are fundamentally different.”

Congress is debating whether to stiffen border policies and tamp down on the record surge of unauthorized migrants entering the U.S. as business interests, citing a tight job market, howl for immigrant workers.

FWD.us, a tech-sponsored pro-immigration outfit, says more immigration can combat inflation. Others say industries such as health care need immigrants to fill jobs Americans aren’t taking. The National Foundation for American Policy says the U.S. working-age population will shrink without a continued net inflow of immigrants.

Mr. Camarota said all of those debates are happening in isolation.

“But there’s very little attempt by policymakers to step back and say how many people can we assimilate? What is the absorption capacity of America’s schools and hospitals? What does it mean to add this many people to the United States in terms of physical infrastructure, congestion, traffic, pollution?” he said. “A fair reading would be that, at the very least, immigration impacts all those things and they are seldom discussed in a way that acknowledges the scale of immigration.”

At nearly 50 million immigrants, the U.S. is by far the global leader — though the share of the population has topped by several nations. Most are small territories, though Australia has roughly 30% immigrants, Canada has more than 20% immigrants and Germany has nearing 20%.

The U.S. pace has grown an average of 137,000 a month since January 2021. It was just 68,000 a month under President Obama and 42,000 a month under President Trump, even before the pandemic led to stiff border controls.

Mr. Camarota said 56% of the net increase under Mr. Biden is a result of illegal immigration.

Mr. Biden took office with a pledge to reverse some of the get-tough Trump-era policies, and the result has been a record surge of unauthorized migrants arriving and being allowed to enter.

Mr. Camarota said the phenomenon is relatively new.

Overall, three-quarters of the nearly 50 million immigrants are in the U.S. legally.

“None of this is like the weather. None of this is outside the control of the United States,” Mr. Camarota said. “The United States determines both the level of legal immigration and the effort to control illegal immigration. The Biden administration has made a choice to mostly not enforce the immigration laws with enormous consequences for illegal immigration.”

Mr. Camarota used the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, a monthly dataset that determines the monthly unemployment rate and asks about nation of origin.

The numbers are, if anything, an undercount of the actual immigrant population, he said.

The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, a larger annual dataset, suggests somewhat lower numbers, although its data is not as current. Mr. Camarota said the CPS, which uses in-person surveys, may be more accurate for the foreign-born population, particularly amid an illegal immigrant surge, because it is better at determining who is in a household.

Even the ACS shows a trend line headed toward a record.

Mr. Camarota said the trajectory shows that Mr. Biden will leave office with more than 17% of the country as immigrants if he serves two full terms.