Those on the ground could feel it, and now the numbers are there to back it up: Something unprecedented happened in immigration over the last four years of the Biden administration.
Some 8.3 million new immigrants settled in the U.S. between January 2021 and this January, and about two-thirds of them are here illegally, according to a new report Wednesday from the Center for Immigration Studies.
That’s more than the previous 12 years combined, and it has pushed the foreign-born population to 53.3 million, or nearly 16% of the country’s total residents. That shatters the previous peak around the turn of the 20th century.
The numbers are so big that they’re forcing the government to rethink what it knows about immigration. Just two years ago, the Census Bureau predicted it would take nearly two decades for the foreign-born population to reach 15.8% of the population. In fact, it took just two years of Biden surges.
“We’ve never been here before. America has entered uncharted territory on immigration,” said Steven A. Camarota, the demographer who wrote the new report. “The scale is unprecedented … with enormous implications for everything from schools and health care to the labor market to our ability to assimilate so many people.”
The Census Bureau late last year acknowledged it had been missing hundreds of thousands of new arrivals each year in its calculations.
It adjusted its migrant numbers for 2022 and 2023 up by nearly 2 million total. The bureau now says the U.S. netted 1.7 million immigrants in 2022, 2.3 million in 2023 and a whopping 2.8 million in 2024.
By contrast, it averaged between 730,000 and 1.2 million during the Bush, Obama and first Trump administrations.
The bureau’s Current Population Survey for January 2025 is the first to incorporate the new estimates, and that’s the data Mr. Camarota used for his study.
He said if anything, the bureau is still probably undercounting the numbers, particularly illegal immigrants.
“I would say at this point the illegal population in January was close to 16 million, and that’s a conservative estimate,” he said.
In 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, he put the number at 10 million.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform released its own report on Monday pegging the illegal immigrant population at 18.6 million. FAIR used the same January Census Bureau data, but its analysts made a large adjustment for an undercount of illegal immigrants.
The Center for Migration Studies, based in New York, in its latest estimate released last year, calculated the illegal immigrant population at 11.7 million as of July 2023.
Overall, Mr. Camarota said, the U.S. saw between 11.5 million and 12.5 million new arrivals in the Biden years. But because of deaths and returns, the net was 8.3 million.
The surge was all the more striking because of a severe drop in net migration in 2020 and 2021, as the pandemic raged.
The Biden years saw another major shift in demographics with migration from Latin America once again surging.
In the late Obama years through the first Trump administration, Latin Americans accounted for less than 40% of new immigrants. But that figure topped 50% in 2023 and by this January it was nearing 60%.
Immigrant rights groups have cheered the surging numbers, saying the U.S. needs the workers for its economy and owes safe harbor to those fleeing rough conditions at home.
They made a concerted effort during the 2024 presidential campaign to argue for higher levels.
“Immigrant workers are a major and vital component of the U.S. workforce across occupations and industries, many of which would struggle without their contributions,” the Economic Policy Institute and Immigration Research Initiative said in a memo.
Mr. Camarota said the recent surge has added millions of new workers to the labor force, but said it also added 3.3 million non-workers as well.
He said there’s also a tradeoff to the new arrivals in that they keep wages low for less-educated and lower-skilled workers. He said one result is that U.S.-born men are being replaced in the workforce by the new immigrants.
