Illegal immigrants driven to cross the U.S.-Mexico border under President Joe Biden’s lax policies have helped to push the foreign-born population in the country to a new record high.
A new analysis of census data previewed by Secrets found that there are now 46.6 million legal and illegal foreign-born immigrants in the country, up 1.6 million over last year.
The analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies also said that the foreign-born population is now 14.2% of all people in the country counted by the census. That is the highest in 112 years.
“If present trends continue, the immigrant share is likely to surpass the all-time highs reached in 1890 (14.8%) and 1910 (14.7%) in the next few years,” said the report’s authors, Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler.
For much of last year, illegal immigration dominated the headlines as some 2 million were encountered by U.S. border officials. Many others avoided detection to enter the United States.
Biden has dismantled much of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to slow that flow, including ending construction of a border wall and policies to both squeeze entries and deportations.
That shift was cited in the report as a driving reason for the new record of foreign-born people in the U.S.
In answering the question “What’s changed?” the report said, “The large surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border caused in part by the perception, based on his campaign promises, that President Biden would curtail immigration enforcement explains at least some of the growth in the immigrant population we are seeing.”
Federal officials said the surge began a month before Biden took office. The CIS report added, “The immigrant population began to grow, relative to the same month in the prior year, in December 2020 and has continued to increase every month thereafter.”
Several states have already challenged Biden’s pro-immigrant policies.
On Wednesday, for example, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is to argue before the Supreme Court that the administration should resume a decadeslong policy of granting special immigration status only to those who won’t have to use welfare to survive in the country.
And Trump, who made the border wall a key 2016 campaign promise, has condemned the Biden policies.
