How Many Illegals Are in the United States? The Real Number May Shock You

Democrats have been Lying to the American Public for Decades

Our Country made an astonishing shift from re-establishing border security under President Trump to a willful effort to ensure that we had no border security at all under Biden. To illustrate just how astonishing this shift really was, in the first week since Trump re-assumed office, illegal border crossings dropped by up to 93 percent.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that our State Department and USAID have been driving the illegal crossings, giving the UN’s International Organization of Migration $4.5 billion in the last two years alone, by far the most on record.

As we’ve written a number of times, Biden’s State Department provided enormous amounts of funding to the hundreds of NGOs that established way-stations all along the routes from Latin America into the US—driving millions of illegals into our country in the process.

Now, to the horror of the far-left, Trump has begun to re-address the immigration problem by deporting people that are here illegally in the United States. Which raises a very real question: Just how many illegals are there in the United States?

Democrats have repeatedly claimed over the last 20 years that the number of illegals in America is roughly 11 million people—which would be bad if it were true but the truth is far worse than that. At least 11 million illegals entered the country under Biden alone. As we will see, the number of illegals within this country is actually several multiples of this 11 million number.

We all know that illegal immigration has gotten exponentially worse, not better. Even before the disastrous Biden Administration we already had enormous problems. Weak enforcement, porous borders, and ongoing effects since the passage of NAFTA helped to fuel the flow of illegals, as did ongoing talk of future amnesty from Democrats in Congress.

Chain Immigration, which began in 1965—whereby former illegal immigrants were allowed to sponsor their family members—has caused tectonic demographic and cultural shifts. California shifted from a reliably red state to an entrenched blue stronghold.

Chuck Schumer, who has been among the more vocal Democrats pushing the fictitious 11 million number of illegals, has also been pushing varying types of Amnesty programs for illegals over the span of his entire 30-year career—and his efforts go all the way back to 1984, when President Reagan was in office.

At the time, Reagan stated during a presidential debate that “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though some time back they may have entered illegally.” Reagan’s comments paved the way for the disastrous Immigration and Control Act of 1986 which made any illegal immigrant who entered the US before 1982 eligible for amnesty.

It was Reagan’s greatest failure as a president. To be clear, Reagan was well-intentioned—but he misjudged the treachery of the DNC. As Daniel Horowitz noted in 2018, “Every bad outcome on immigration has emanated either from the unelected branches of government or legislation that was sold to the American people as doing the opposite of its actual intent.”

The 1986 bill, which would become to be known as The Reagan Amnesty, was a sweeping immigration reform bill that was sold to the American public as a crackdown—a supposed solution to what even then was perceived as a border crisis.

The biggest flaw in Reagan’s Amnesty lay with those in Congress who had promoted the Act in the first place. While Reagan saw the 1986 deal as a compassionate solution to a pre-existing problem, members of Congress—particularly Democrats, along with some well-known RINO’s—saw an opportunity to gain voters.

Once amnesty was enacted, members of Congress simply refused to provide funding for the promised border restrictions, preventing any real action to combat illegal immigration. There were also no real penalties for the unauthorized hiring of illegal aliens by employers.

Political advocacy groups also worked to undermine the enforcement of immigration laws. Leading these efforts in Congress were Senators John McCain and Chuck Schumer. Reagan had been tricked and betrayed.

Indeed, illegal immigration quickly climbed to record levels after Reagan’s Amnesty—with the number of illegal immigrants more than doubling in the ten years following the passage of the 1986 Act. By 1996, illegal immigrants were estimated to be around 8-plus million—far exceeding the roughly 3 million illegal immigrants who were granted amnesty status in 1986.

In early 2005, the Left-leaning Pew Research Center came out with a new study whose stated intention was to estimate the numbers of “foreign-born persons living in the United States without proper authorization.” Its real purpose was to validate the massive undercounting that was present in official government numbers.

Pew determined that as of March 2005, the undocumented population had reached approximately 11 million including more than 6 million people from Mexico. The study found that most of these people had come to the country after 1990. The study also determined that about 80 to 85 percent of the migration from Mexico had been undocumented.

It was this extrapolated figure of 11 million illegal immigrants from Pew’s 2005 study that was used by Democrats for the next two decades.

However, there was another detailed study that was also done in 2005—by Bear Stearns Asset management. The study by Bear Stearns acknowledged upfront that the official immigration statistics were grossly undercounting the number of illegals.

Unlike federal estimates, the Bear Stearns study looked at things like school enrollments, demand for public services, foreign remittances, border crossings, and housing permits, noting that these other statistics “point to a far greater rate of change in the immigrant population than the census numbers.”

Bear Stearns found that in 2005, “the number of illegal immigrants in the United States may be as high as 20 million people”, more than double the official Census Bureau figure. The study rightly observed that “Illegal immigrants work very hard to conceal their identities and successfully avoid being counted” noting that “Census officials and academics underestimate the ingenuity and the efficiency of the communications network among immigrants.”

The Bear Stearns methodology, done for the benefit of its investors rather than political purposes, seems to be based on more trustworthy, quantifiable data.

But we have another data point as well—a Yale Study from 2018. This study, which relied “on a range of demographic and immigration operations data,” found that there were as many as 29 million illegal immigrants, with an estimated mean of 22.1 million in the US in 2018. As the study itself noted, they used an “extremely conservative model” to do “a sanity check on the existing number.”

Like the Bear Stearns study, the Yale researchers acknowledged that “the survey method doesn’t effectively reach a group with incentives to stay undetected.” As one of the authors of the study noted, “What we’re saying is the number has been higher all along.”

Not to be outdone, the Pew Research Study decided to once again provide their own estimates of illegal immigrants—this time for the year 2017. Recall that Pew said there were roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in 2005—using a methodology that could politely be described as questionable.

For 2017, Pew claimed that the number of illegal immigrants in the US had FALLEN from 2005 by half a million—to 10.5 million illegal immigrants. The study purported that illegal immigrants had peaked at 12 million in 2007 and fallen steadily from there.

How did Pew arrive at such a shockingly low, counterintuitive number that contrasts dramatically with the other studies? That question is hard to answer as the methodology used by Pew is somewhat indecipherable—something which Pew referred to as “residual estimation methodology”. But the overall formula they used was laughable.

The number of illegal immigrants was derived by taking the number of foreign-born US residents and then subtracting the “estimated lawful Immigrant population.” In other words, they simply created the numbers. Read the methodology for yourself. It’s astonishing.

Not only can Pew’s 2017 estimate be completely disregarded, the flawed methodology and conclusion also calls into question their 2005 study’s estimate of 11 million illegal immigrants.

Extrapolating between the 2005 Bear Stearns Study and the 2018 Yale Study—which found that the illegal immigrant population was as high as 29 million in 2018 using a model which its authors admit was based on an “extremely conservative” model—it would seem reasonable to say that the illegal immigration population was at least 30 million by 2020—probably higher.

Although the 30 million number is admittedly a rough guess, it’s a conservative guess based on these underlying studies from Bear Stearns and Yale that validate each other.

Joe Biden opened our nation’s borders with a series of Executive Orders that began on Day One of his administration. The flood of illegals into our country began—assisted by billions in NGO funding from Biden’s State Department and USAID.

According to most estimates, there was an influx of nearly 11 million illegals during the four years of the Biden Administration—a number equal to the total number of illegals so frequently quoted by Democrats.

The studies from Bear Stearns and Yale validate each other and conform to what we have been seeing transpire at our borders. We also know that the methodology used in Pew’s 2017 study is highly questionable—so much so that it should be discarded from serious consideration. Does anyone actually believe the number of illegal immigrants in our country declined from 2005 to 2017?

Pick whatever number you like—we think the number of total illegal immigrants is probably in the 40 million range—but we can all agree that the 11 million figure touted by Democrats is utter nonsense. The thing is, they know that it's nonsense. But then again, they also know that amnesty would provide them with a huge influx to their voting base.