Analysis of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey shows that the total foreign-born or immigrant population hit a new record high of 51.4 million in February 2024 - an increase of 6.4 million since President Biden took office.
In February 2024, the foreign-born population in the United States hit a new high of 51.4 million and 15.5 percent of the U.S. population - surpassing all prior records.
While a large share of the recent growth in the foreign-born population is due to illegal immigration, legal immigrants still account for roughly three-fourths of the total foreign-born population.
Even concentrating on just the last two years shows that between January 2022, well after Covid, and February 2024, the total immigrant population grew by 4.8 million.
Table 1 shows the foreign-born by region in January 2021, the month President Biden took office, and each February from 2021 to 2024.7 Growth in the foreign-born population is being driven by immigrants from Latin America, whose number has grown 4.2 million since January 2021, with South America up 1.7 million, Central America up 1.4 million, and the Caribbean up 703,000.
Figure 5 shows the number and foreign-born share of the U.S. population since 1850, which was the first time they were identified in the Census.
As a share of the population, even in 1890 and 1910 during what is often called the "Great Wave" of immigration, the foreign-born were a smaller share of the population than they are today.
The decision to reduce interior enforcement not only swells the illegal immigrant population by lowering the number who are sent home each year, it also encourages others to come and stay knowing that they will probably never be made to leave.
Using available administrative data on legal immigration and making reasonable assumptions about out-migration and mortality, we estimate that the post-1980 legal immigrant population in the CPS grew from 28.4 million in January 2021, to 31.4 million in February 2024 - a three million increase.
18 If our estimate of the post-1980 legal population is correct, then there were 13.7 million illegal immigrants in the February 2024 CPS.19 Using our prior estimates of undercount produces an illegal population of 14 million in February 2024, four million larger than in January 2021, when President Biden took office.
20 These estimates indicate that the illegal population in the survey increased by 3.7 million, accounting for about 58 percent of the 6.4 million growth in the total foreign-born population from January 2021 to February 2024.
21 Figure 8 shows the relative stability in this population from February 2010 to February 2020.
Compared to February 2020, right before Covid-19 hit, the post-1982 non-citizen Latin American immigrant population increased by 3.6 million, and compared to February 2019 it is up over three million.
The 6.4 million immigrants added to the nation's population was equal to 1.9 percent of the total population based on the February CPS. If the increase in immigrant workers increased GDP by 1.1 percent, while increasing the population by 1.9 percent, it must lower per-person GDP. Per-person GDP is simply the total GDP divided by total population.
The February 2024 Current Population Survey, collected by the Census Bureau, shows that 15.5 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign-born - the largest share on record.
The immigrant share of the population has more than tripled since 1970 and nearly doubled since 1990.
For Biden, the average reflects growth in the foreign-born population between January 2021 and February 2024 of 6.38 million divided by 37 months.
The total foreign-born population in the CPS is a much more statistically robust number because it is based on a larger sample of all immigrants, not the smaller share who are newcomers.
We can gauge the impact of including the institutionalized when calculating the foreign-born percentage by looking at the public-use 2022 ACS, which shows that when those in institutions are included it lowers the foreign-born share of the population by less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
The institutionalized share is not a very large relative to the overall population, so it makes very little difference to the foreign-born share of the total population.
The bottom line is that the inclusion of the institutionalized in February 2024 might have reduced the foreign-born share of the overall population by about one-tenth of 1 percent.
20 Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, "Estimating the Illegal Immigrant Population Using the Current Population Survey: Data shows number fell from 2019 to 2021 but rebounded by more than one million by early 2022", Center for Immigration Studies, March 29, 2022.
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Share-and-Number-Record-Highs-February-2024
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