Who Will Be Deported?
You might be surprised....
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Note to readers: This post covers the “big picture” of unauthorized immigration, providing the context for the next two posts on how unauthorized immigration affects US agriculture and our food. I’ve been shocked at how different the story is from the actual data, and so I went back to the raw data to make sure, building my own spreadsheets. I hope you will read this post to share my journey to the facts—and justify my weeks(!) of research. But if you are short on time, here are the key points to carry with you into the next two agriculture posts:
The recent surge (2019-2024) of immigration attempts was actually smaller than past surges. Immigration attempts in 19 years before 2019 exceeded the peak year in this recent surge. Legal technicalities (Title 42 vs Title 8), much-improved border patrol interception, and election-year hype made this surge seem bigger than it was.
The people targeted for mass deportation are correctly called “unauthorized immigrants,” not illegal, not criminal, and not undocumented. This group includes anyone without Permanent Resident (aka “Green Card”) or official Refugee status.
Many unauthorized immigrants—30% of the 11 million total from 2022 often cited—have documentation in the form of DACA status, a pending asylum application, temporary protected status, and/or work authorization. This documentation would have protected them from deportation in the past, but the second Trump administration is attempting to strip these protections with Executive Orders.
The first Trump administration deported the fewest unauthorized immigrants of any administration in the past 4-1/2 decades. It was also the only recent administration that did NOT prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal convictions.
The number of unauthorized immigrants in the US right now is about 11.7 million—more than the 2022 11 million estimates—but still less than the 12.2 million peak in 2006.
It could cost over $216 billion to deport all unauthorized immigrants, based on cost per deportation in the past five years. Increased use of expensive military transport and expanding detention will drive that cost up.
These unauthorized immigrants pay almost $100 billion in taxes each year. In 2022, they paid almost $34 billion in Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment taxes. That was about 2.5% of our Social Security payout in 2022. They can’t collect benefits from these programs.
Over nine out of ten unauthorized immigrants have been here longer than five years. More than three out of four have been in the US longer than 15 years. One in eight is a spouse or stepchild of a US citizen.
Unauthorized immigrants are less than half as likely to commit crimes as US citizens are.
About 8.5 million unauthorized immigrants are working. Over a third are working legally—they have US government-issued work authorizations. In other words, they have some documentation.
Our current unemployment rate is 4.1%, or about 6.6 million people, so deporting all 8.5 million unauthorized immigrant workers would leave almost 2 million current jobs empty.
The typical immigrant arriving at age 25 contributes more to our economy over their lifetime than a US-born citizen of equivalent education—even when you factor in public resources to raise their children.
Unauthorized immigrants may be contributing as much as 8% to the US GDP.
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The 2024 election campaign featured much hype about an “invasion” of “illegal criminal immigrants.” The 2020 election campaign also featured a lot of this talk, but the tone became more alarmist this time around.
On Facebook, I saw a meme that claimed this invasion of illegal immigrants was morally equivalent to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At church on Sunday, a neighbor told me how worried she is about the “100 million illegal immigrants just let into our country.” Wow. That would make one out of four people in our local grocery store an “illegal immigrant.” My neighbor hasn’t actually met any illegal immigrants, but we Americans have a tendency to overestimate the percentages of “others” in the population. Then we construe the lack of these “others” in our own communities as “evidence” that there are hordes of these “others” just outside our community, waiting to overrun us. Recent surveys show that the percentage of US citizens who are very worried about immigration has doubled to 55% in the past few years.
What’s feeding our paranoia about “illegal immigrants?” Our media has been bombarding us with pictures of huge crowds of ragged, scruffy people trying to cross our southern border. And in the last six years, huge crowds of people have been trying to cross our southern border. After hiking up to two thousand miles trying to escape war and oppression and starvation in their countries of origin, they look like hell, probably because they’ve been through hell. Makes me wonder what these people left behind that would convince them that working at our most menial jobs is worth this dangerous trip—especially with a very uncertain outcome at the end. These people aren’t showing up in tanks or blowing our power plants and electrical grid to smithereens with missiles like the Russians invading Ukraine are. Guns are actually flowing the other direction across our borders (about 200,000 firearms illegally exported per year) so let’s skip the “moral equivalency” talk and get to the data.
Our new-old President promised a “mass deportation of 11 million illegal criminal immigrants on Day One!” Where did that number—and other numbers he sometimes mentions—come from? Who are these people? Because US agriculture is the number one employer of “illegal”—the more accurate term is “unauthorized”—immigrants, I decided that this merited a deep dive into what will deporting them do to our farms and food systems.
One thing I learned in this deep dive is how different the actual data is from talk, beginning with the start of the current “invasion.” The most recent surge in attempted migration began in 2019, not 2021. The general strangulation of international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 interrupted this surge briefly, but it resumed in 2021. While this surge has been smaller than the 1980-2007 surge, its last month – December 2023 – set a single-month record at almost 250,000 migrant encounters at the US-Mexico Border. 2024 saw a major drop in foreigners attempting entry into the US, ending with migration attempts lower than 2019 numbers, but that December 2023 video was on an endless loop during the 2024 campaign. It’s permanently engraved in our crocodile brains and collective fears.
This 2019-2024 migration surge followed ten years (2008-2018) of relatively low border encounters. Take a look at this plot of US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) “encounters” over the past 45 fiscal years:
The above chart (Chart 1) covers all land, sea, and air encounters. I am emphasizing the word “encounters”—these are NOT net immigrations! An encounter is CBP dealing with one individual trying to enter the US on a given day, regardless of the outcome (expulsion, deportation, or asylum claim recognition). The current surge—starting in 2019—has numbered about 8.9 million total encounters so far. The rate of encounters continues to drop in 2025, but we won’t be able to do a year-over-year comparison until the fiscal year 2025 wraps up. Remember that FY2025 is October 1st, 2024, through September 30th, 2025.
Unfortunately, the immigration data for the past five years is complicated by the fact that two different systems—Title 8 and Title 42—governed deportations for over three of the five years. The usual laws governing immigration and asylum-seekers are in a section of the US code called “Title 8.” You’ve probably heard more about “Title 42” since the first Trump Administration imposed it in March 2020. Title 42 is actually a World War 2 (1944) “Emergency Health Authority” that allows the US to suspend Title 8 rights when spread of communicable diseases are a concern. The Trump Administration used the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to suspend Title 8. The Biden Administration kept this policy in place until court decisions allowed its end in May 2023. The important differences between Title 42 and Title 8? Title 42 suspended the immigrants’ right to request political asylum before deportation. Title 42 allowed immediate “expulsion” of immigrants—also known as “expedited deportation”—back to those countries that would take them. These expulsions are shown in orange on the above bar chart. Not all countries would take back their fleeing citizens, which is why CBP could not immediately expel 100% of the people trying to enter the US. If you’ve protested against a dictator usurping power, that dictator doesn’t want you dumped back in his lap. CBP still had to treat many under Title 8 (shown in dark blue on the chart).
Title 42 also levies no punishment on an individual for trying to re-enter the US after an expulsion. A would-be immigrant can just keep trying to re-enter the US illegally until they don’t get caught. Mexico agreed to take Title 42 expulsions from some central American countries in addition to their own, so many immigrants were not “expulsed” all the way back to their country of origin. Those expedited deportees could try again almost daily. Some did. Some eventually got across the border without getting caught. Consequently, it’s impossible to tell if any particular encounter-deportation under Title 42 is a repeat offender or a new arrival. So, did we have nine million different people trying to enter the US, or three million people each trying three times? Contrast this with Title 8: If you have grounds for asylum, the point is to get “encountered” after you cross the border. With Title 8 enforcement, many successful border-crossers immediately seek out CBP officials and surrender, because then they can file a claim for political asylum and stay while their claim works its way through the system. Many political asylum seekers expelled without screening under Title 42 tried again under Title 8 after May 2023.
Pew Research Center (a non-partisan data analysis group and self-described “fact tank”) has a plot (Chart 2) to help visualize the number of people who have tried to cross the US-Mexico border since 2000, where those scary photos were taken in December 2023:
This is the border people usually mean when they say “Build the Wall” or “Secure Our Borders.” These encounter numbers call the Border Wall’s effectiveness into question. Recall that US-Mexico border barrier construction began in 2006, and the border encounters began dropping in 2007-2008, so you might at first glance think that more fence is better. Maybe “good fences make good [international] neighbors”—but the Great Recession (2007-2008) drying up US jobs was probably the real cause of the illegal border crossing attempts. By 2016, about 649 miles (about a third of the 1,954 border) was fenced at $3.5 million per mile. Since 2016, only 60 miles have been added to that Obama Administration total: 40 by the Trump Administration and 20 by the Biden Administration. Turns out that all but 700 miles of the US-Mexico border is water—the Rio Grande—and fencing that is a bit tricky. Most of the border wall work since 2016 has been upgrading 395 miles of old border fencing. Unfortunately, the fence’s recent upgrade and extension did not prevent the surge beginning in 2019. The main impact of the Border Wall may be just moving the surge to other border locations. At $33 million per mile ($15 billion covering 455 miles), that’s not a good ROI.
This border wall drama reminds me of how my brother does livestock fencing. Now, my brother builds the best fence in the US—but he does only a section at a time and then he waits until the sheep and cows find they can walk around the end before he starts the next section. The trail built alongside the new fence needed to build it makes this discovery process easier for the animals. And by the time he gets the fence built all the way around a pasture, the first section he built needs replacing. Sure enough, the US-Mexico border now has great roads along the wall sections built, and most of the money during the Trump Administration was on replacement fence. Meanwhile, the cartels have built tunnels under the fence while migrant smugglers routinely cut the barrier, using those roads to transport power tools. Farmers must be thanking their patron Saint Isadore that cows and sheep haven’t figured out how to use wire cutters, grinders, or tunnel-boring machines! (I’m not so sure about goats and pigs.)
On Main Street USA, we tend to forget that the US-Mexico border is not our longest land border. Our northern border with Canada is 5,525 miles long, 2.83 times the length of our southern land border. People also attempt to immigrate via ports and airports. And some come in on boats and rafts. Remember the “wet feet, dry feet” scandal of Cuban immigration? That is why total national US CBP encounters are higher than those at the US-Mexico border. Hiking across the southwest desert looks easier than swimming the ocean. I suspect that this is why Florida Governor DeSantis had to borrow recent immigrants from Texas’ Governor Abbot to send to Martha’s Vineyard.
Let’s return to that word “encounters” and see how an encounter might translate into an immigration. An encounter is apprehension of a person crossing the border without authorization. That border crossing apprehension may result in immediate deportation as “inadmissible” or it may result in detention. The US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) doesn’t let most of these “encountered” people into the US. If the border-crosser is eligible to apply for political asylum or another kind of humanitarian visa and doesn’t have a criminal record anywhere, they should in theory be kept in US detention until their asylum claim is completely evaluated. In practice, the US has never had enough immigrant detention space to detain all asylum and visa applicants while awaiting the processing of their claims. US law also limits length of detention for some groups. So, immigrants claiming asylum are usually allowed to stay in the US without detention as “unauthorized immigrants” while their claim is adjudicated. This is the source of that “catch and release” expression: It’s the only way CBP can follow all the US laws.
To those worrying that the asylum system may be “gamed” or abused, consider that almost half (46%) of asylum applicants admitted to the US are eventually granted asylum. The US does not grant political asylum for economic hardship. You must prove safety, political, ethnic, or religious persecution in your home country. Returning to your home country during that time will automatically disqualify your political asylum case, because the underlying assumption of your asylum claim is that you are not safe in your home country. So, these schemes to make people wait outside the US while their claim is evaluated are pipe dreams at best and an intentional denial of US legal counsel and safety at worst. In the 1990s, I helped a family with a strong case through the political asylum process. It was an intense effort requiring hundreds of pages of documentation. It took about 7 months from application to decision. Now, it takes years. A typical asylum applicant will be stuck in quasi-legal “unauthorized immigrant” twilight zone for years. Too few immigration judges, too little funding to support the process. The recent increase in border encounters has also pulled resources away from immigration law enforcement in our county’s interior. Unfortunately, the most recent attempt (February 2024) to increase funding for CBP—including immigration case handling and courts—was defeated in the US Senate.
Let’s not forget that CBP also manages the official points of entry on land borders, ports, and airports! The agency supports our food system by preventing the import of agricultural pests, diseases, invasive plants, and illegal animal products. In FY2024 alone, they issued nearly 79,000 Agricultural Emergency Action Notifications, a fancy name for significant violations of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regulations. CBP also intercepted over 1.3 million Quarantined Materials in FY2024. That required many more millions of inspections than interceptions because most people aren’t trying to smuggle anything into the US. And illegal drugs? 90% come through legal entry points with US citizens. So, these 58,000 CBP employees are very busy. Here’s how much their total enforcement actions including migration cases have grown (Chart 3):
CBP had about 55 enforcement actions per employee in FY2023. That’s more than one per week per employee. Perhaps we should remember that the next time someone is bashing government employees as lazy or incompetent.
But, but, you ask: How many people evade the Border Patrol on their way into the US? In the last decade, the Border Patrol has gotten much better at apprehending border crossers. That’s how we got those scary videos. Before 2012, they were not even catching 50%! Before 2000, the percentage of apprehensions of border crossers was about 35%. This means the actual illegal immigration in the 1980-2010 era was as great as what we have seen in the past five years. Or worse: five of those years (1986, 1996, and 1998-2000) saw over a million encounters each year, and at 50% apprehension, that means over two million illegal immigration attempts each of those years – with over a million of those evading our Border Patrol in each year. Since 2012, Border Patrol has typically caught over 70% of the people attempting to cross outside of official entry points. In many recent years, they’ve caught almost 90%. Technology, not a wall, has made a huge difference.
I located statistics of “the ones that got away” and added them to the above enforcement chart in blue to get a picture of the total number of attempts to enter the US—both successes and failures—by non-citizens (Chart 4):
Compared with the decades before 2010, the current surge doesn’t look so big and long, does it? A little math says that there have been over 112 million attempts to enter the US since 1980. About 8.9 million attempts occurred in this current surge (2019-2024). The peak year was 2022. At least nineteen years in the 1980-2007 migration surge exceeded the 2022 total! The number of border-crossers eluding the Border Patrol was much, much higher in that surge—about 64 million. About 2.3 million people managed to elude the Border Patrol during the current surge. Yes, some of those folks are still inside the US. There’s another group of federal employees (Enforcement and Removal Operations) who have been very busy finding people eligible for deportation and making that happen. Here’s how busy, shown by presidential administration:
President Clinton was the grand champion of deportation—by millions—in the past 40-plus years. All of these presidents exceeded the famous “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower years (which involved deportation of somewhere between 300,000 and 1.3 million immigrants, including some US citizens). This chart shows how far apart rhetoric and action can be. The president who talks the toughest on deportation did the least deporting during his first administration–and blocked funding to do more deporting while out of office. That president may have been worried about the economic impacts of mass deportation during a time of low unemployment—some of his senior aides routinely told industry leaders that the US needed more immigration to keep the economy going.
Note that I’m saying “illegal immigration attempts,” rather than “illegal immigrants.” Entering the US without undergoing an inspection at an official entry point is a federal crime; however, just being in the US without a visa or permanent residence approval (aka “green card”) is not a federal crime—it’s only a civil offense. So, while their method of initial entry may be illegal, but the people who have entered are not “illegal.” Furthermore, many immigrants enter the US legally with a visa and then they “overstay” that visa, that is, they don’t leave the US before their visa expires. Overstaying your visa is a civil offense, but it’s not actually illegal or “criminal.” You will still get deported if caught inside the US, but you can’t be put in jail. Many people who enter the US on a visa apply for political asylum as soon as they arrive, hoping that the US will grant asylum before their visa expires, which almost never happens in the current funding climate. ICE’s backlog includes 2013 applications!
Suppose a visitor has a current visa but is not complying with its restrictions? We’ve been hearing about one prominent case: Elon Musk came to the US on a student visa which does not authorize paying work outside the immediate academic community. Thus, when Elon started his first company instead of going to school, he was in violation of the terms of that student visa. He couldn’t be called an “undocumented immigrant,” because he had documentation—a visa—but he was abusing his visa. Turns out that “student visa abuser” is a technical term in immigration law enforcement and can carry criminal as well as civil penalties along with deportation. In agriculture, however, visa abuse tends to be quite different: human trafficking, employee exploitation, and fraud by “employers” are more common than, say, an H-2A visa recipient working in construction instead of agriculture. Most employers of H-2A visa holders try to follow the difficult rules—but more on H-2A in the next post.
So, what do we call non-citizens who are in the US without official residency (a green card) or without a valid visa or who are not abusing the terms of their visa? The official term is unauthorized immigrants. This term includes those allowed to stay legally in the US after apprehension and those who are not apprehended on their way into the US. It does not include immigrants granted refugee status by the United Nations’ High Commissioner of Refugees. Refugee status comes with a path to citizenship and immediate work authorization. President Trump just suspended US participation in international refugee resettlement programs, so people don’t have that legal alternative to entering the US for now.
So which unauthorized immigrants have some legal basis for staying in the US? Those who have applied for political asylum in compliance with US law and are waiting for a final decision. Other unauthorized immigrants have a pending humanitarian visa application, including special categories T and U for human trafficking victims. Some are US Military combat veterans who have not completed residency applications, as military service can result in a path to citizenship. Others are married to US citizens and are somewhere in the process to get permanent residency (a “green card”). Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—immigrants brought to the US while children but whose parents failed to initiate US residency applications when their own were approved—are also categorized as “unauthorized.” Another large subset of “unauthorized” immigrants was given official Temporary Protected Status (TPS) because conditions in their home country make their return impossible or unsafe. The latter category includes people from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ukraine. And yes, these include the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been legally employed packing farm produce while NOT eating pets or geese.
A friend of mine asked a reasonable question: Why don’t these people apply for legal immigration? Most of the “legal” opportunities are very limited and take years. Most are not available to people without higher education or a stable home in their country of origin. During the latter half of the Biden Administration, there was a legal alternative. People could schedule an asylum-screening appointment using the CBP One App. Yep, there’s an app for that! Or rather, there was. Daily appointments were limited, but it was an alternative to illegal crossing for those with strong political asylum cases. November 2024 was a milestone month: More people used the CBP One App to meet CBP personnel at official points of entry that month than tried to cross illegally.
President Trump just kept a campaign promise to end CBP One’s use for asylum claims. People turning up at border checkpoints to keep their CBP One asylum interview appointments on Inauguration Day found that their appointments (made over six months ago) no longer existed. That’s 30,000 people who “got in line” and ended up with nothing but a broken promise to show for it. Without the CBP One application for political asylum, people seeking asylum will have to return to attempting illegal entry as the first step to applying. Oh, oops, President Trump’s “Day One” executive orders have also suspended all political asylum applications from anyone entering outside of legal entry points. But another of his executive orders designates the narco cartels in Mexico and other American countries south of us as “Terrorist Organizations.” He’s also gotten Canada to do likewise. An overdue designation in my opinion—but apparently someone in the White House forgot that declaration triggers US statutory obligations to grant political asylum to victims of terrorist organizations. Millions of people are victims of those narco cartels—including those immigrants who follow Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, waiting in Mexico until their US Immigration Court date.
The demise of the CBP One App is only one new restriction on legal immigration. The second Trump administration has restarted its aggressive efforts—begun during the first administration—to reduce all legal immigration. This includes a reduction in the number of green cards available, an end to the diversity lottery, limits on various visas, moratorium on political asylum applications from outside the US, limits on immigration by relatives of US citizens, and reductions in refugee admissions. So getting into the US legally (and not just overstaying a tourist visa) may not be an option if staying in your home country will result in your arrest, execution, or starvation. But oops, the Trump administration has introduced a policy of revoking green cards and even naturalized citizenship if the individual has violated any US laws or policies in obtaining those. (Elon, call your office….)
I totally get the concern about a loss of control of our national border – a nation can’t function without control of its borders. But why the recent increase in concern, given the fact that our recent surge is actually less than past surges? One difference between now and the earlier waves of labor importation is where these people are coming from. People are coming from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, China, and Africa as well as Mexico. The cultural mash-up of the US Southwest that we once celebrated—Tex-Mex food and Tejano music—is now a source of fear of erosion of “American culture” (whatever that is).
More justifiable is fear of crime. We are hearing that immigrants are all criminals in their home country or committing a large number of crimes after they get here. Now, Americans have been blaming immigrants for crime since before 1776; however, the modern “immigrant crime wave” story likely originated with the 1980 “Mariel Boatlift” when Cuba’s Fidel Castro bragged about emptying Cuba’s jails and mental institutions into unseaworthy boats. I recall wall-to-wall news coverage in 1980 of the Mariel Boatlift. It profoundly influenced my generation’s view of refugees and immigrants. Now Castro’s jails and mental institutions contained a large number of political prisoners, but there were some criminals in the mix. The bad publicity caused difficulties in getting US sponsors for these refugees (not illegal immigrants). President Carter detained about 20,000 at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, with military deployed to take care of them. The detention under substandard conditions at Fort Chaffee led to protests by the detainees. Outside the base, Ku Klux Klan members circled with torches, aggravating the situation. A scuffle ensued, killing one detainee and injuring others. Opponents of immigration blew this scuffle up into huge headlines, and Governor Bill Clinton lost his reelection over the bad press.
Miami (not Arkansas) did see an increase in crime for a time after the Mariel Boatlift refugee wave. This was a lone exception in recent US immigration history. The opposite usually occurs: immigrants generally commit crimes at about half the rate of US citizens. Many of these people fled crime in their native countries. Perhaps when you hike a thousand miles or so through mountains and jungles to flee from violence, you are rather biased against committing violent crimes in your new (safer) home, especially if committing those crimes will cost you a chance to stay here.
Unfortunately, the Mariel Boatlift has made the ground of our collective conscious fertile for the “13,000 murderers turned loose among us” story now making the rounds. That 13,000 (actually 13,099) is the number of convicted murderers outside of ICE detention over more than forty years, not the number today. That’s an average of fewer than 300 per year. A lot of these people are dead now. Others were deported long ago. Others are still serving time in US federal and state prison for their crimes. Some have finished prison terms and will be deported when ICE tracks them down. Local law enforcement can only hold a person suspected of being unauthorized for 48 hours beyond the end of their sentence, so ICE doesn’t have much time to pick them up.
The Obama and Biden administrations prioritized deporting unauthorized immigrants who had committed crimes, but—surprising to me—the first Trump administration did not prioritize deporting convicted criminals above others. Deporting these people can be a challenge, so perhaps focusing on them reduces your deportation success rate. Why is this hard? Some criminals finished prison terms here, but ICE couldn’t deport them because their country of origin wouldn’t take them back and no one else would either. Because US law does not currently allow ICE to detain a person longer than six months, they are freed to fade back into the unauthorized immigrant population here. Some were convicted of crimes in their country of origin – not in the US – and served their time there before coming the US afterwards. Some of these foreign crimes were real and some were not, because dictators often frame their political opponents with crimes to lock them up. A few unauthorized immigrants are fugitives from justice in their home country. Those people should never have been granted any protected status in the US. It’s really hard to do background checks from another country. I know this from personal experience with humanitarian and refugee cases—we struggled to produce the data the FBI demanded for someone on another continent with a hostile government.
The idea that the guy milking cows on our neighbor’s farm might have served time for murder makes a lot of people feel that a mass deportation of all unauthorized immigrants will reduce crime and make us safer. Several recent studies show that immigrants are 47% less likely than native-born US citizens to commit violent or property crimes. It turns out that the only crime that the most unauthorized immigrants commit is entering the US outside of the legal points and mechanisms of entry. Nearly half of these unauthorized immigrants haven’t committed any crime at all because they entered the country legally (although their visa overstay is a civil offense). Maybe hanging out at the nearest dairy farm is safer than hanging out at other places in the US. Oh, oops, I forgot about the bull: the dairy bull is the most dangerous farm animal. Maybe the most dangerous animal, period. Hmmmm…. I suppose I should make sure the unauthorized immigrant farm employees are between me the bull. Why am I singling out dairy workers? Stay with me through the next newsletter to find out.
I want to emphasize that I am not an advocate for breaking US immigration laws. A nation has to have control of its borders. I am also an advocate for finding US-produced food to buy in the grocery store and for US farms thriving. While US farms are barely surviving rather than thriving, we can still find some US farm products in our grocery stores. Unauthorized immigrants are helping enable that. Perhaps if we know who they are and how many they are and why they are unauthorized, we can find a legal way to have them help us put inexpensive, safe food on our dinner plates.
The new administration has put a number on this problem: 11 million. But 11 million who? All sorts of labels are bandied about: Illegal immigrants, illegal criminal aliens, undocumented immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants, to name a few. Because we are hearing the number 11 million so much, I went looking for the definition that matched that particular number. It’s the 2022 total “unauthorized immigrants” number from Pew Research, which is based on US Census data (Chart 6, below). Now you know why I have been insisting on that word “unauthorized” instead of “illegal.”
To clarify, “unauthorized immigrants” includes a large number of immigrants with some legal status, but they do not yet have political asylum, current visas, or green cards. I added up the numbers of “unauthorized” immigrants who are actually “legal” in some sense and got 3.18 million souls as of December 2024, about 29% of that 11 million total “unauthorized.” Organizations like Pew Research say the percentage of legal but not authorized immigrants is “about 30%” so I am pretty comfortable with my math.
But wait—my math and Pew Research’s math are now out of date. Unfortunately for people on TPS, the president can cancel that status for their country of origin, making them eligible for immediate deportation. And guess what, President Trump cancelled TPS for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on Day One. That made about 550,000 more people immediately deportable. President Trump also cancelled all pending political asylum cases for people who requested asylum after entering outside of legal entry points—the number of people this order affects is unknown. Unfortunately for those trying to follow our work and asylum laws, deportation is easy to do when you voluntarily gave the US government your address to legally obtain work authorization or apply for asylum.
Ah, you may be thinking, 11 million was the 2022 figure, and your charts show over three million people have attempted entry since then. Yes—the analysis is complicated and still being finalized, but right now the net number of unauthorized immigrants inside the US has probably grown to 11.7 million. Despite all the rhetoric, 11.7 million is not the peak number of “unauthorized immigrants” in recent history. The peak was 12.2 million in 2007. The Great Recession and the Obama administration’s very aggressive deportation program had a lot to do with this long-term decline.
If we subtract the people who have some permission to be here (TPS or pending asylum or pending visa applications) from that unauthorized total, the number of people who can be deported under Title 8 may be around 8.5 million. That’s still a lot people to find and deport. These are also the people who are hardest to find, because the US government doesn’t have addresses on file for them. The 2024 bipartisan immigration reform bill that would have (among other things) funded an increase in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) personnel did not pass. This is the same bill that would have funded more Customs and Border Patrol (CDP), immigration judges, and detention center beds, too. That bill would have funded a large number of the Project 2025 priorities on immigration reform. Remember that the US Constitution assigns responsibility for creating laws allocating resources for enforcing them to our Legislative Branch; the Executive is constrained to carry out the laws using the budget approved by the legislature. Over the past five years, the average cost to deport an unauthorized immigrant has been $19,599. So, it could cost $166,592,000,000 (about $166.6 billion) to deport 9 million immigrants. If the US dramatically changes political asylum laws (or the current administration just ignores US laws) to allow the legal deportation of all people who currently have pending asylum applications, the total deportation cost exceeds $216 billion. That’s direct costs, which are likely to increase with more use of detention and dedicated military aircraft flights. I don’t know enough to calculate the indirect costs of pulling law enforcement officers away from fighting crime and military personnel away from fighting terrorism.
At least 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants are working full time. This 8.3 million means that a significant percentage of unauthorized immigrants are working without work authorization. If you have applied for political asylum, for example, you can’t begin working legally for six months to a year after your application. Even after that waiting period, you must apply for “employment authorization” to work—often called work authorization. This delay in allowing work authorization the political asylum laws was meant to discourage people from applying for political asylum unless they had a very strong case. In practice, it means that a lot of immigrants who have some legal status must work without authorization to support themselves, because they are NOT eligible for US taxpayer assistance. Oh, the application for employment authorization (Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization) has a filing fee of $520. Guess how you get that fee, along with your groceries and shelter, when you are not eligible for public assistance? But if your I-765 application is approved, you get a social security number and are in e-Verify. You must pay payroll taxes even though you may never be eligible to collect benefits. You transition from being an unauthorized immigrant who is working without a work authorization (unauthorized-unauthorized) to an unauthorized immigrant who is authorized to work (unauthorized-authorized). Are you still on this horse with me?
One frequent argument for deporting all these unauthorized immigrants is that they are taking jobs away from US citizens and legal residents. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (US BLS) says the total US workforce including unauthorized immigrants working without authorization was about 161 million in 2023 and about 162 million in 2024. Doing a little math suggests that unauthorized immigrants make up 5.1% of our total US workforce. The December 2024 unemployment was 4.1%, perhaps 6.6 million people. Remember that the official unemployment rate only counts people who are actually looking for work, not people who have sidelined themselves. If 8.3 million fulltime workers suddenly disappeared from the US workforce–an economic rapture, perhaps?—would those 6.6 million unemployed US citizens and residents jump up off the proverbial couch to take those jobs, leaving us with 1.7 million jobs with no one to fill them?
Somewhere around a million of those suddenly-empty jobs would be on farms. The tech industry laid off over 400,000 workers in the past three years. If you are a US citizen who got laid off from a six-figure IT job at, say, Twitter (oops, X), would you be eager to earn a $30,000/year harvesting strawberries or lettuce? Or milking cows and shoveling manure? “Content moderation” at X or YouTube might make shoveling manure look good. However, unlike the unauthorized immigrant, US citizens are eligible for benefits like unemployment, Medicaid, and SNAP. I bet most of those farm jobs would be in the 1.7 million unfilled. I bet the harder, messier food processing jobs would also land on that unfilled list. Perhaps those of you laid off from IT and tech jobs would see a higher ROI in fighting H-1B visa abuse. H-1B visas are given to highly-educated foreigners in specialty occupations like IT—or fashion models, who are eligible for H-1B3 visas regardless of their formal education.
Recent polls show that most US voters who named immigration as one of their top issues support a “mass deportation” policy that deports very recent illegal arrivals who have criminal records or are taking public resources away from US citizens. The common perception is that most unauthorized immigrants arrived since 2020, during the Biden Administration’s so-called “Open Border Policy.” Well, if you shout “the US border is open” on US TV, a lot of people who are having a rough go of it somewhere else will come to check it out. And yes, they are listening to US TV because they are studying English. When I was on a mission trip to Bolivia in 2001, I asked all the young people there who spoke English how they learned it. The almost universal answer was “My mother got a job cleaning house for wealthy families, and she took me with her so I could watch their American TV to learn English.” The reality is that the Biden Administration kept right on enforcing Title 8 and Title 42, albeit without some aberrations like separating children from their parents. The other reality is that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have been in the US for a long time. You probably already suspected this from the charts above, but take a look at this distribution by arrival decade (Chart 7):
Yep, over nine out of ten unauthorized immigrants got here before 2020. About four of five have been here over a decade. Almost one in eight is a spouse or stepchild of a US citizen. They work. They have essential job skills. Many own businesses providing essential services and products. They are part of community infrastructure.
What about our other concern that unauthorized immigrants take up public resources? They pay almost $100 billion in taxes each year (twice the entire FY2024 USAID budget). If they don’t have a work authorization, they don’t collect any tax credits. For example, in 2022, federal, state, and local governments received an average of $8,889 taxes per immigrant. $33.9 billion of those 2022 taxes went into Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance, programs from which unauthorized immigrants can never collect benefits. Unauthorized immigrants paid about 2% of the Social Security deposit coming to a bank account near you.
The conservative Cato Institute says that even an immigrant arriving at age 25 with less than the equivalent of a high school education contributes more to our society than a US-born high-school dropout. In fact, that immigrant will make a net-position contribution while the US-born individual will be net-negative (a drain). For one thing, that unauthorized immigrant didn’t spend 12 years in US public schools before they started working. Take a look at this analysis (Chart 8):
That same immigrant’s children—birthright citizens—do go to school, so the Cato Institute deducts their descendants’ cost from their contribution to the US. Overall, an American University study concluded that unauthorized immigrants contribute $2.2 trillion to the US economy, boosting US productivity by $1.7 trillion. They may be contributing as much as 8% of the US Gross Domestic Product.
In a time of general housing shortages and rural healthcare deserts, however, you may find it hard to believe these numbers. During our recent primary election (for our VA-5 congressional representative), I received ten colorful, over-sized postcards from one candidate accusing his opponent of voting to use state taxpayers’ money to send “illegal aliens to college.” The real story? As a sitting state assembly delegate, said opponent had voted to approve the complete state budget. Buried in that budget every year is funding for our state universities to discount tuition for students who have resided in the state for three years prior to enrollment. Virginia state law allows Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) who have been residing in the state for three years to enroll at the “in-state” tuition rate. DACAs are unauthorized immigrants despite having “documentation” and a quasi-legal status. Unfortunately, they currently have no path to US citizenship, stuck forever in limbo.
For me, the picture of a DACA immigrant is that of a brilliant engineering student who helped me on my graduate research years ago. He was working on the artificial heart project while still an undergraduate. We celebrated his admission to a prestigious joint medical and engineering graduate program. His plan was to get doctorates in both medicine and engineering, continuing his work on the artificial heart through graduate school. Then we got awful news: his acceptance into this prestigious graduate program was revoked upon the discovery that his parents had failed to file for his citizenship when they had gotten their own. He was not a US citizen despite having spent most of his life in the US, and he did not even know he wasn’t a citizen until he was accepted into graduate school. A quarter-century later, we still don’t have that artificial heart. Still in DACA limbo, he’s now a tech executive, but I will always wonder if we would have an artificial heart if he’d had a path to US citizenship.
Thanks for staying with me through this complex topic. I hope you feel smarter. I hope you are also wondering: Why are we so much more worried about unauthorized immigration now than we were during the nearly 30 years (1980-2008) when it was as high or higher? President Reagan told us that immigrants made us all richer and we believed it then—and supported naturalization of over 3 million. Well, almost: inflaming anti-immigration fears transformed the 1994 California governor’s election. Some people took notes. For 2024’s election, consider the pervasive messages about our country being in decline. When any group loses confidence in itself, its “in” members become more suspicious and fearful of any “out” group. Round-the-clock doom and gloom rhetoric piled onto pandemic isolation and trauma can erode a group’s confidence. The “in” group’s cohesion increases with rhetoric that amplifies their fear of the “out” group. Now you know why that’s a popular and effective political refrain. And why so many US voters who can’t name a single unauthorized immigrant decided it was their first or second issue. Check out the book How Confidence Works by neuroscientist Ian Robertson (link below) for more on this dynamic—it’s well worth the read.
Next time, I will return to farm country and dig into the impact of unauthorized immigrants on the farm-to-fork journey our food takes. What might our grocery stores look like after a “mass deportation” of 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants—or even just the approximately 8.55 million who now lack any kind of legal status?
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Reference Notes:
Should you want to do your own research on immigration, here are readable sources that are also reliable and accurate. I base my definition of “reliable and accurate” on cross-checks with each other and with government-published data. Always check the references cited to make sure they aren’t running you in circles. Please ignore the people who make it hard to find their data sources. In addition to US CBP and DHS data now being online, USA Facts (non-partisan site devoted to making government data more accessible), Pew Research Center (a non-partisan think tank), and The Cato Institute (a conservative think tank) all compile a lot of good data on immigration and explain it well. I have also included links to raw government data for those either very curious or suffering from insomnia. Links to recent Executive Orders are at the end for those looking for an emotional adrenaline fix.
Perceptions versus Fact:
Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Immigration Explanations:
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topics/immigration-101
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-04/Fiscal-Impact-of-Immigration-WP.pdf
From USAFacts website:
How many unauthorized immigrants are in the US? | USAFacts
Statistics on unauthorized US immigration and US border crossings by year | USAFacts
Immigration Data from the Department of Homeland Security:
ICE releases fiscal year 2023 annual report | ICE (all annual reports are on-line, and are fairly readable, although they can leave you having trouble seeing the forest for all the trees!)
ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics | ICE
Other Immigration Analysis:
Breaking Down the Immigration Figures - FactCheck.org
Sharp fall in migrant encounters at US-Mexico border in 2024 | Pew Research Center
What the Data Reveals About U.S. Immigration Ahead of the 2024 Election — ProPublica
Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’ | Brennan Center for Justice
CBP One App: CBP One - Wikipedia
Definitions of terms used in immigration tracking:
What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. | Pew Research Center
Fact Sheet: Temporary Protected Status (TPS) - National Immigration Forum
United States Code Title 8:
What is Title 8 — and what has it changed after Title 42's end? - CBS News
Title 8 of the United States Code - Wikipedia
United States Code Title 42:
Title 42 expulsion - Wikipedia
Title 42 dramatically changed who arrived at U.S.-Mexico border
Border Wall:
The Border Wall Didn’t Work | Cato at Liberty Blog
Mexico–United States border wall - Wikipedia
The failure of the last immigration control bill (February 2024):
Unraveling Misinformation About Bipartisan Immigration Bill - FactCheck.org
Taxes paid by unauthorized immigrants:
Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants – ITEP
Good Sanity Check on the popular “stories” about immigrants:
The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They're Wrong | Cato at Liberty Blog
Breaking Down the Immigration Figures - FactCheck.org
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: a quiet border, mass deportation, military flights - WOLA
Data on Legal Permanent Residents:
Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present | migrationpolicy.org
Surveys on US Voter attitudes about unauthorized immigrants:
Most say undocumented immigrants should have some way to stay legally in US | Pew Research Center
As Trump vows mass deportation, polls suggest growing support – but not a mandate | CNN Politics
Economic Impact of Unauthorized Immigration:
Proof that immigrants fuel the US economy is found in the billions they send back home
Past Elections Amplifying Fears about Immigration:
The 1994 Campaign that Anticipated Trump 2024 | TIME
Great Book by Ian Robertson About Confidence (Group and Individual):
How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief
President Trump’s Executive Orders Impacting Immigration:
Guaranteeing The States Protection Against Invasion – The White House
Securing Our Borders – The White House
Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program – The White House
One of my students was brought into the USA by her parents as a baby. She has contributed to our economy for half of her life, but still lives in limbo as a "Dreamer" who has only ever lived in the United States. We need to create a path for citizenship for people like this.