The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) today released its latest estimates of the size of the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States, pegging the number at 15.8 million in mid-2024, after hovering in the 11 million range throughout the decade beginning in 2010.
The increase is primarily driven by record unauthorized arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Biden administration’s wide use of humanitarian parole programs to reduce chaos at the border. As a result of these grants of parole and other Biden administration moves, MPI estimates that, as of mid-2024, a maximum of 40 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the United States held a liminal (or “twilight”) status providing them temporary protection from deportation, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole or pending asylum application.
The MPI estimates, developed in concert with Jennifer Van Hook, a demographer at The Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute, derive from a residual method that subtracts estimates of the legally resident foreign born from the total immigrant population recorded in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). The most recent ACS is for 2024.
The estimates reflect the growing diversification of the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population, due to the widening array of nationalities arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border over the past several years from within and beyond this hemisphere. The Mexican share of the unauthorized immigrant population was 35 percent as of 2024—a sharp decline from the 62 percent share in 2010 and 49 percent in 2019. …
Another analysis on the limits of immigration to address population aging and low fertility rates:
Countries around the world face a demographic transition that is arriving faster than many governments have planned for, as falling fertility and aging populations place growing pressure on workforces, tax bases and the public systems that support retirees.
The scale of the change is now visible well beyond the wealthy countries that have long grappled with aging populations. China’s annual births have fallen to levels not recorded since 1949, and comparable declines are underway in countries across Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many countries old before they grow rich, with shrinking workforces and rising costs for pensions and health care.
A new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy brief finds that treating immigration as a numbers game—rather than planning for integration and workforce participation—leaves much of its demographic dividend on the table.
In many fast-aging, wealthier countries, governments have long leaned on immigration as a response to shrinking, aging workforces, but the math does not support that expectation at scale, Meghan Benton, director of MPI’s Global Program, writes in Population Aging Is Here. Immigration Can Offer Half an Answer. Holding worker-to-retiree ratios steady through migration alone would require a 75 percent increase in the combined population of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries by 2050—a level of growth few, if any, publics would accept.
Immigration should be understood as a partial lever rather than a substitute for broader demographic strategy, which must include retirement-age extensions, productivity investments, family-friendly policies and social security reforms, the brief notes.
On the immigration front, Benton argues that governments need to pay greater attention to whether newcomers and their families can participate fully in the economy; failure to do so leaves real fiscal value on the table when integration is treated as secondary.
The brief sets out several principles for better leveraging immigration, including prioritizing the skills and career stage of arriving immigrants; treating integration programming, including language training, as an investment rather than a cost; folding immigration into the same long-term planning governments already apply to pensions, housing and infrastructure; addressing pension gaps for aging immigrants through portable retirement funds; and ensuring immigration narrows rather than widens global inequality by investing in skills partnerships that connect training, mobility and local development.
The brief also cautions against assuming artificial intelligence can quickly substitute for immigration. Benton notes that prioritizing high earners may be difficult given rising low-skilled labor shortages in sectors such as elder care, agriculture, hospitality and construction, which remain largely resistant to near-term automation. Governments will need to prioritize those with flexible skills.
“While immigration cannot solve population aging, it can be a useful demographic and economic lever—if it is employed more effectively,” Benton writes. “The next few years will provide a real-time experiment in the success of policies that prioritize immigration versus other economic levers to help countries navigate population aging, including extending retirement age, investing in productivity advances and reforming social security systems. Different models are already taking shape.”
The Trump administration has embarked on a robust campaign to strip a record number of immigrants of their U.S. citizenship, shifting resources within the government to achieve the quotas it has imposed on federal prosecutors. While the process of denaturalization is as old as naturalization itself, albeit historically rarely invoked, the administration is seeking to use its authority in greater and different ways. Once reserved largely for Nazis, communists, and security threats, denaturalization now could be used by the Trump administration for a broad set of criminal acts and cases deemed “sufficiently important to pursue,” which some fear could mean naturalized citizens accused of engaging in disfavored speech or political activity.
The administration’s ability to meet its ambitions is uncertain, given the legal protections related to citizenship that have evolved over the years. When Congress brought naturalization under exclusive federal authority in 1906, it saw denaturalization as a measure of last resort. Although hundreds of immigrants were stripped of their U.S. citizenship annually on average in subsequent decades—many of them perceived enemies of the state, anarchists, or nationals of wartime adversaries—the Supreme Court sharply curtailed use of denaturalization after 1967. Between 1990 and 2017, an average of 11 denaturalization cases were filed per year.
The Trump administration tried to buck the trend during its first term, setting a lofty goal of 1,600 denaturalization referrals for the long-running Operation Janus, which was investigating fingerprint records that had not been digitized. But its results fell far short; the average of about 25 civil cases filed per year was a significant increase from the past, though far below rates of the pre-1967 era and well below the goal. (Given that denaturalization is a lengthy and deliberative process, it is unclear how many of these cases ended in individuals being stripped of U.S. citizenship). So far during the second Trump term, the administration had reportedly identified 384 potential denaturalization cases as of April 2026. As of this writing, it had filed charges against at least 39 individuals in 2026.
Whether the latest campaign leads to denaturalization numbers on par with those of a century ago or not, it will likely have the effect of stoking fear among immigrants—even those who had assumed that becoming a U.S. citizen was the final and irreversible act of integration into U.S. society. The administration’s rhetoric and actions have injected doubt in that long-held assumption for some, potentially permanently altering perceptions about the value of acquiring U.S. citizenship.
Appears to be a smaller percentage than in Canada based upon my and StatsCan analysis (about 0.5 to 0.7 percent of total births).
…Birth tourism is not a new phenomenon, yet the push and pull factors are poorly understood. Studies show that the promise of U.S. citizenship and related opportunities for the child, such as access to higher education, are among the motivating factors behind birth tourism. However, other factors, including access to advanced U.S. medical care as well as home-country policies, also play a significant role. For example, many Chinese mothers traveled to give birth in the United States while China’s one-child policy was in effect from 1980 to 2015 (children born outside of China were not covered by the policy).
Birth tourism presents a paradox for policymakers. The act of giving birth on U.S. soil by temporary visa holders is not illegal. However, applying for and securing a visa solely for the purpose of garnering U.S. citizenship for a child is both an act of fraud and grounds for inadmissibility. In addition to issues of visa fraud, birth tourism crosscuts with other concerns, including the prospect that businesses facilitating this travel misrepresent their profits and thereby commit tax evasion, and that these mothers will fail to pay the medical costs incurred during pregnancy and delivery.
There are no official estimates of the number of babies born as a product of birth tourism. However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers the closest approximation, using data on annual births. In 2024, the CDC reported almost 9,600 babies were born in the United States and U.S. territories to foreign mothers who listed their official address as outside the United States or its territories. While this may be interpreted as a proxy for babies born due to birth tourism, the number includes women who did not necessarily intend to have a baby in the United States, which is necessary under the current definition of birth tourism. Moreover, it excludes births to women who traveled to the United States with the intent to have a baby but who used a U.S. address to avoid scrutiny (this is a part of some business models promoting birth tourism). Even still, these babies were a miniscule fraction of all 3.7 million births in 2024, and the rate has remained steady over time (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Number of Babies Born in the United States to Foreign Residents and Share of All U.S. Births, 2016-24
Note: Figure shows the number of annual U.S. births to mothers listing their official address as outside the United States or its territories. This includes people who did not come to the United States specifically to have their baby, but not babies born to unauthorized immigrants or to temporary visitors using a U.S. address. Sources: Data for 2016 are from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), User Guide to the 2016 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2017 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2017 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2018 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2018 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2019 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2019 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2020 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2020 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2021 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2021 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2022 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2022 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2023 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2023 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online; data from 2024 are from CDC, User Guide to the 2024 Natality Public Use File (Atlanta: CDC, N.d.), available online.
Even the most expansive estimate that draw on analysis of government data finds birth tourism represents a tiny fraction of all U.S. births. The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for low immigration, suggests the number of babies born as result of birth tourism ranges between 22,000 and 26,000 annually, though this estimate is contested….
Having campaigned on and won re-election with immigration as a top issue, President Donald Trump has kept it at center stage in the first year of his second term. Immediately upon returning to office, the administration advanced sweeping changes to immigration policy, unprecedented in their breadth and reach. These changes have made the United States more hostile to unauthorized immigrants while also altering how the government treats immigration and immigrants of all legal statuses and the communities in which they live. The impacts on individuals, families, workplaces, and the nation’s overall economic outlook and global standing will be felt for years ahead.
While some efforts have stalled or not yet met the White House’s lofty goals, the administration has dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants in the country, deter unauthorized border arrivals, make the status of many legally resident immigrants more tenuous, and impose obstacles for lawful entry of large swaths of international travelers and would-be immigrants. These changes could set the course for reduced family, humanitarian, and employment-based immigration in the future, while also driving key aspects of U.S. foreign policy.
To accomplish the administration’s mass deportation goal, Trump advisor Stephen Miller and other aides dismantled longstanding norms. The White House invoked archaic statutes, enlisted support from state and local law enforcement as well as federal agencies that historically had no immigration enforcement role, and pressured foreign governments to receive deportees. Perhaps most visibly, it militarized immigration enforcement: Scenes of troops and masked federal agents roaming U.S. streets, lobbing tear gas and in some cases violently—and even fatally—subduing individuals, have garnered global attention and profoundly changed how many residents go about their daily lives. Among other changes, some U.S. citizens now feel compelled to carry identification with them at all times.
The administration has leaned heavily on executive action rather than seeking legislative change in Congress. As of January 7, Trump had signed 38 executive orders related to immigration, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the 225 total orders signed so far during his first year, which is more than the 220 executive orders signed during his entire first term. The administration also ushered in hundreds of other actions via presidential proclamations and policy guidance that have had profound impacts on immigration policy. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that the Trump administration in the first year of its second term took more than 500 actions on immigration, surpassing the 472 actions over all four years of Trump’s first term.
While some elements of the administration’s approach mirror policies of the prior term, albeit at far greater scale and scope, the changes of the last year have been arguably more impactful than any during the first term. Administration officials appear to have learned from their first-term experience and have also benefited from a much more sympathetic Congress and Supreme Court. Indeed, Congress in July provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with a staggering $170 billion to upscale over Trump’s second term what was already the world’s largest detention and deportation machinery. And the Supreme Court has greenlit several high-profile actions, including revoking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from about 600,000 Venezuelans, although it blocked the administration from deporting noncitizens without due process and did not allow deployment of the National Guard for immigration enforcement. Key questions on birthright citizenship and other immigration policies are yet to be resolved.
The net change has been dizzying in its scope and speed. After the administration further shut down access to asylum, unauthorized arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border plummeted to the lowest levels since the 1970s. This development has allowed the administration to shift its focus largely to unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, whom MPI estimates numbered 13.7 million as of mid-2023. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office, while average daily detention has doubled. On December 19, DHS said that 622,000 noncitizens had been deported since Trump took office, a high—but not historic—number. It is below the 778,000 repatriations carried out in the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, and well short of the Trump team’s pledge of 1 million deportations per year. The administration’s deportation number likely includes noncitizens turned away at U.S. borders and at airports; limited release of immigration enforcement data means it is unclear who is being counted and how. While the administration claims 1.9 million people have “self-deported” during that same period, it has not provided any data, including on use of the CBP Home app, through which immigrants are offered a free flight and $1,000 payment if they return to their origin country.
The hardline approach has extended to many lawfully present immigrants and those aspiring to come legally. The administration has stripped temporary legal protections from more than 1.5 million humanitarian parolees, nearly completely halted refugee resettlement, and severely restricted access to asylum. It has also erected obstacles and therefore slowed the granting of lawful permanent residence, temporary visas, and U.S. citizenship. International students and scholars have been targeted for expressing their political opinions, many newcomers face extensive vetting of their social media activity and medical history, and hefty new fees and visa bonds have caused some would-be immigrants and visitors to rethink plans to come to the United States. Slower legal immigration will likely affect labor markets, local economies, and the broader economic outlook for years to come, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Congressional Budget Office already reporting negative effects and potential future implications.
This article reviews the changes to U.S. immigration policy during the first year of the second Trump term….
Unauthorized migration at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged dramatically during the just-ended fiscal year, as the Trump administration leveraged new border controls, further asylum restrictions, and the promise of mass deportations, reaching about 444,000 migrant encounters recorded in fiscal year (FY) 2025. This sharp drop from 2.1 million encounters the prior year was also marked by reversion to a pattern last experienced more than a decade ago: Flows primarily composed of Mexican single adults and Central American unaccompanied children.
The steep decrease in unauthorized arrivals at the border and return to nationalities that are easier to turn back because of existing repatriation agreements has permitted the administration to direct its focus to immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior—in fact deploying significant U.S. Border Patrol assets to cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. To achieve its goal of mass deportations, the administration has increased coordination among federal agencies, elevated cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies, rapidly accelerated the build-up of detention capacity, expanded the use of fast-track removal powers, tapped the U.S. military, and established new agreements to repatriate returnees to third countries. As a result, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recorded more deportations from within U.S. communities during FY 2025 than the Border Patrol apprehended people crossing the Southwest border illegally—the first time since at least FY 2014, according to available data.
While detailed FY 2025 data about ICE arrests and removals have not been released since January, there is no doubt that interior enforcement has risen. But it has become increasingly complicated to track results because only selective statistics have been made public. Returning to regular reporting of detailed data on immigration enforcement across the various Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration agencies could not only improve the public’s understanding of current immigration enforcement activities but also inform state and local stakeholders who want to collaborate or who are affected by enforcement.
Ramped-Up Interior Enforcement and Mass Deportations
While U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to post border encounter statistics every month, DHS has inconsistently released immigration enforcement data and its last detailed tables of ICE and CBP actions ended with November 2024 activity. Based on the latest publicly available figures, however, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that ICE conducted about 340,000 deportations in FY 2025, including noncitizens with a formal order of removal and immigration detainees who chose to end their detention with a voluntary departure. This would mark a level of activity 25 percent higher than the 271,000 deportations recorded by ICE in FY 2024. These fiscal year figures do not include deportations conducted by CBP, which DHS has yet to release.
The administration says it conducted more than 400,000 deportations overall between ICE and CBP in its first 250 days, and was on pace to reach nearly 600,000 by the end of its first year. This projection falls short of the 685,000 deportations recorded by the Biden administration in FY 2024—and is well off the Trump administration’s pledge of carrying out 1 million deportations per year.
Location Matters
Where the deportations are happening is significantly different under the Trump administration, with more occurring within the U.S. interior rather than at the border. This has significant operational impacts, given deportations in the interior are likely to be far more resource intensive and carry higher individual and societal costs with enforcement happening in U.S. cities and against people who, unlike many recent border crossers, often have significant years of U.S. residence and deep community ties.
Of the 400,000 deportations conducted by the Trump administration through its first 250 days, MPI estimates approximately 234,000 were conducted by ICE from the U.S. interior, with another 166,000 by CBP.
ICE daily deportations, in fact, doubled from 600 in January to 1,200 since June. ICE deportations have increased as the number of immigrants being placed in detention centers has surged. Since the start of the Trump administration, the average number of noncitizens in ICE detention centers has grown gradually, reaching about 60,000 by the end of FY 2025 (see Figure 1). And by March, most detainees had been arrested by ICE in the interior, not by CBP at the border or through CBP transfer to ICE, as was usually the case under the Biden administration….
Another informative MPI fact sheet. Would be nice to have an equally informative fact sheet or analysis for Canada rather than just a general number:
The unauthorized immigrant population has grown sharply, from 10.7 million in 2019 to 13.7 million as of mid-2023, MPI analysts find. Still, even as the unauthorized immigrant population has experienced the sharpest growth since the early 2000s, a full 80 percent have at least five years of U.S. residence—with 45 percent living 20 or more years in the United States.
Unauthorized immigrants made up 26 percent of the overall immigrant population in the United States in mid-2023.
The fact sheet, Changing Origins, Rising Numbers: Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, draws from a unique methodology that MPI created with leading demographers at The Pennsylvania State University and Temple University that allows the assignment of legal status in data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). Given that the Census Bureau does not ask survey respondents if they are in the country without authorization, the resulting dataset offers a rare ability to study characteristics of the unauthorized population.
The fact sheet is accompanied by detailed data profiles of the unauthorized immigrant population at U.S., state and top county levels. The profiles include countries/regions of birth, ages, years of U.S. residence, top job sectors, workforce participation, educational enrollment and attainment, English proficiency, income, homeownership and access to health insurance, among other characteristics.
Among the key findings, all as of mid-2023:
A growing share of the unauthorized immigrant population—as many as 4 million people, or 29 percent of the total—held a liminal (also known as “twilight”) status granting temporary relief from deportation and work authorization, through Temporary Protected Status (TPS), humanitarian parole, a pending asylum application or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Nearly 4.2 million unauthorized immigrants were married to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (aka green-card holder). While marriage typically conveys the right to apply for legal permanent residence, most unauthorized immigrant spouses are unable to apply due to a 1996 immigration law.
6.3 million children under age 18 live with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent. All but 1 million of those children are U.S. citizens.
14 million U.S. citizens, green‑card holders or temporary visa holders share a household with an unauthorized immigrant.
Mexicans accounted for 40 percent of all unauthorized immigrants—down significantly from their 62 percent share in 2010.
21 percent of all unauthorized immigrants lived in California; overall, half lived in California, Texas, Florida or New York.
Good question, force only or with other migration management measures that started under the Biden administration:
Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen to lows not seen since the 1960s. In April, the U.S. Border Patrol reported intercepting fewer than 8,400 irregular crossers—a stark contrast from the record high of nearly 250,000 encounters witnessed in December 2023. And data picked up elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere suggest unauthorized migration headed northward is slowing across the region: Reporting from the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle that divides Panama and Colombia, shows there were just 200 crossings in March, compared to more than 37,000 the same month a year earlier.
With these near-historic lows, the Trump administration can rightfully claim that it has secured the border at this time, building on declines that began in early 2024 and accelerated in the second half of the year. The longer-term test, however, is whether this success can be sustained through the administration’s new show of force alone, without the less visible migration management ingredients that led to the quieting border the administration inherited.
A Year-Long Story of Reduced Migrant Flows
The current lows build on a pattern of reduced irregular arrivals that started with changes in Biden administration policies in early 2024. Amid the record level of Southwest border arrivals witnessed in December 2023, which came on the heels of two years of record border encounters during the Biden administration, the U.S. and Mexican governments negotiated increased Mexican enforcement at Mexico’s northern border and throughout the country, including checkpoints throughout well-traveled interior routes.
With this ongoing additional enforcement from Mexico, irregular arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased by 53 percent between December 2023 and May 2024 (see Figure 1). The impact of Mexican enforcement cannot be overstated: Mexican authorities recorded more encounters than did the U.S. Border Patrol every single month between May 2024 and March 2025 (the most recent month for which Mexican enforcement data are available).
Figure 1. Irregular Migrant Encounters by U.S. Border Patrol at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2023–25
Note: The data here reflect encounters recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol of migrants crossing the border without authorization; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations encounters of migrants arriving at a U.S. port of entry without prior authorization to enter are not included here. Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters,” accessed May 29, 2025.
Following implementation of the Biden administration’s June 2024 Secure the Border rule, irregular encounters continued to drop, with the ongoing aid offered by increased Mexican enforcement. This rule sought to disincentivize illegal entries and incentivize arrivals at a port of entry by further limiting access to asylum for those who crossed between ports of entry and permitting an appointment, through use of the CBP One app, to be screened at an official port of entry. Those who entered through the CBP One app could later go on to apply for asylum.
Irregular crossings dropped from 84,000 that June to 47,000 in December, a 43 percent decrease. Notably, encounters in December 2024 were 81 percent lower than the same month a year earlier. Proof that the carrot-and-stick approach was beginning to turn the tide was seen in November 2024, when for the first time more migrants arrived at ports of entry than between (see Figure 2). Though by a small margin, this shift established a pattern of more migrants seeking to enter lawfully via CBP One rather than risk entering irregularly.
Figure 2. Migrant Encounters At and Between Ports of Entry at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2024
Note: Office of Field Operations (OFO) encounters occur at ports of entry; U.S. Border Patrol encounters occur between ports of entry. Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters.”
Inheriting an Increasingly Quiet Border
Thus, the current lows seen under the Trump administration represent a continuation of trends established during the prior administration—and momentum the Biden team put in place by increasing migration management cooperation with Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere as well as further narrowing access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, upon taking office, the Trump administration shuttered many of the programs that had become the basis for dramatic reductions in irregular arrivals.
During his first days in office, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the border and a migrant “invasion.” By cancelling use of the CBP One app while leaving the Secure the Border rule restrictions in place, the Trump administration made asylum inaccessible at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most notably, the administration terminated access to Biden-era humanitarian pathways that had helped reduce chaotic arrivals at the Southwest border. The Trump administration swiftly ended admissions under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) parole program, which reduced irregular encounters of those nationalities at the border by 92 percent between October 2022 and December 2024. Nearly 532,000 individuals were admitted through the CHNV program, allowing them access to work permits and temporary relief from deportation. The administration also closed the Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) that had been set up in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala to consider migrants for refugee resettlement or other lawful pathways before they reached the U.S. border. More than 40,000 people were approved for U.S. refugee status through the SMOs.
Of note. Canadian non-resident self-pay births for temporary residents and those on visitor visa suggest equivalent Canadian numbers of those who could be affected would be around 5,000:
Ending birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to unauthorized immigrants or certain other non-citizens would have a contrary result from its stated aim of reducing the unauthorized immigrant population. New estimates from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Penn State’s Population Research Institute demonstrate how repeal would significantly swell the size of the unauthorized population—now and for generations to come.
The new projections show that ending birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children with parents who are either unauthorized immigrants or temporary visa holders (or a combination of the two) would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075.
Each year, an average of about 255,000 children born on U.S. soil would start life without U.S. citizenship based on their parents’ legal status, the research shows.
President Donald Trump on his first day back in office signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to certain non-citizens. The order, which has been stayed by the courts amid questions over its constitutionality, specifies that going forward, only children born to at least one U.S.-citizen or lawful permanent resident parent would automatically acquire U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court on Thursday will hold an oral argument on the issue.
Beyond significantly adding to an unauthorized immigrant population that MPI estimates stood at 13.7 million as of mid-2023, the end of birthright citizenship for many children would create a self-perpetuating, multi-generational underclass—with U.S.-born residents inheriting the social disadvantage borne by their parents and even, over time, their grandparents and great-grandparents. By 2075, there would be 1.7 million U.S. born who were the children of two parents who had themselves been born in the United States, yet would nonetheless lack legal status, the authors estimate.
“This creation of a class of U.S.-born residents deprived of the rights that citizenship conveys to their neighbors, classmates and work colleagues could sow the seeds for significant disruption to economic mobility and social cohesion in the years and decades ahead,” Jennifer Van Hook, Michael Fix and Julia Gelatt write in the analysis published today.
The researchers’ projections use assumptions that in-migration, out-migration and fertility rates will hold steady. Yet even if the U.S. government fully sealed the border against illegal entries and ramped up deportations significantly, changes to birthright citizenship would still result in an unauthorized population that is 1.3 million larger in 2045 than it would be if current birthright citizenship interpretations held.
Invoking the specter of “invasion,” the Trump administration has set out to build a fundamentally new, all-of-government machinery to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations of resident unauthorized immigrants and new irregular arrivals.
To carry out this enterprise, the administration has enlisted federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that have previously never played significant roles—or any, in the case of the IRS—in immigration enforcement. It also has directed other federal law enforcement entities, including prosecutors, to prioritize deportations. And it has significantly increased the military’s involvement by deploying sizeable numbers of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, for the first time using military aircraft to carry out deportation flights, and, also in a first, detaining noncitizens arrested inside the United States at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Reaching beyond the federal ambit, the administration is also doubling down on its pressure on state and local authorities to conduct immigration enforcement actions traditionally reserved for federal agents, and is seeking or threatening to penalize those that offer resistance. And it has made cooperation on immigration a high priority in foreign affairs, taking an iron-fist approach to negotiations with foreign counterparts. Facing U.S. threats to impose tariffs, end foreign assistance, and take over the Panama Canal, Mexico and a number of other Latin American countries have agreed to implement migration controls, with some also agreeing to hold third-country nationals removed from the United States. So far, these countries have sought to appease the Trump administration, but policy implementation has been measured and strategic. Mexico, for example, has refused to accept deportees arriving on military planes and has also threatened reciprocal tariffs on U.S. imports should the Trump administration impose tariffs as early as March 4.
Finally, the administration has achieved something that several of its predecessors could not: Getting Congress to act on immigration legislation. The White House scored a victory when, within a few days of the inauguration, Congress in a bipartisan fashion passed the Laken Riley Act, the first stand-alone immigration legislation in nearly two decades. The law dramatically increases mandatory detention of noncitizens accused of certain criminal offenses.
The orchestrated, whole-of-government machinery displayed by this administration in its first month—accompanied by a muscular, carefully crafted messaging campaign—has the closest parallels with the actions that occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when broad swaths of the federal government were repurposed to serve the national security mission. The fundamental difference is that post-9/11 actions were a response to an actual attack on U.S. soil, whereas today’s rhetoric of “invasion” and the arrival of foreign “military-age” men intent on building an “army” is not matched by reality. While encounters of asylum seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border reached record levels in fiscal year (FY) 2021 and FY 2022, there is no evidence so far of a significant threat to national security or general public safety. And, in fact, irregular crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border significantly declined during 2024, and in particular during the latter half of the calendar year….
Multicultural Meanderings 