by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
Tens of millions of people live illegally on American soil. ICE’s escalating deportations – and the escalating protest response – mean America can no longer dodge a choice about how to treat them.
The easy part is over.
Americans wanted the borders closed.
For decades, the legacy media and politicians in both parties ignored that wish, claiming the United States had to accept and support an endless flood of illegal migrants. The disconnect between average people and elite opinion was so obvious that academics wrote papers about it.
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President Trump broke with the elite consensus from the first day of his 2016 presidential campaign, when he announced “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” No issue proved more politically potent for him.
In his second term, Trump has kept his promise. The wall may not be literally complete, but it might as well be. Customs and Border Patrol reports monthly “encounters” with illegal migrants on the southern border have fallen about 95 percent from the Biden Administration average, and 97 percent from their 2023 peak.
But closing the border to new arrivals does not undo the fact that tens of millions of people are living in the United States illegally, or with quasi-legal “asylum” or “temporary protected” status the Trump Administration is now seeking to revoke.
Just how many people are inside the United States illegally? We do not really know. In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security put the figure at roughly 11 million in 2022 — and said the number had not changed for almost 20 years.
That estimate is nonsensical, given that close to 10 million people arrived in the first three years of the Biden Administration alone.
In 2018, in a paper that should have received more attention than it did, three researchers from Yale and MIT estimated about 22 million people — double the official figure — were living illegally in the United States.
As the paper explained, the consensus 11 million figure comes from a census question that “requires accurate responses from survey respondents when asked where they were born, and whether they are American citizens.” In other words, the survey required illegal immigrants to tell on themselves — to government officials. (It’s a surprise the figure was not zero.)
The researchers used a different method, netting out changes in immigration over time by estimating the number of migrants entering, leaving, and dying. To be clear, this was an exercise in modeling, with all the uncertainty that implies. But even a modeled figure is better than a clearly nonsensical one.
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