#WTH The facts about illegal migrants

A worthwhile education from our top nerd

As Californians and their fellow travelers fly Mexican flags, burn cars, attack police, and loot — all part of what are being labeled “peaceful” protests against ICE roundups of illegal aliens — precious little attention is being paid to who these meritorious undocumented people are, in real life, in America. First, they’re not Mexican; and neither is California. But there’s a lot more.

Let’s take a quick step back. I am an immigrant. Absent immigration, America wouldn’t be the country we know. As our colleague Nick Eberstadt explains, if it were not for the immigrant population in this country, the United States would look like Japan — old, and still aging. Still, there are likely more foreign-born people in these United States today than at any time in the country’s history.

©America’s Immigration Mess: An Illustrated Guide

Legal immigrants in America also work more — ie, have higher workforce participation rates — and compared to native-born Americans, have higher educational attainment. Indeed, there are only two places in the world that the world’s leading inventors want to be: The United States and Switzerland. Per Nick, “if you try to put the United States of America on a chart with all of the other countries in the world [comparing significant inventions], you can't because the US number is so high, it pops off of the chart.” Immigrants come to America to thrive.

Nonetheless, waves of uncontrolled migration like those that washed over the country during the Biden administration have implications for the country that cannot be ignored. Let’s step back for a sec and look at Europe. Although Nick didn’t dive as hard into the EU statistics as he did into the American, there can be little doubt that millions of Muslim immigrants are changing Europe.

It’s not just that Muhammad is the #1 baby boy name in the UK, and has been climbing through the top 10 since 2016, it’s that increasingly, certain Muslim populations in Europe are not integrating into their host country. Here’s Nick again:

Here's a huge difference, and this does show up in the numbers that the European Union is willing to collect. In Europe today, in the EU 27, if you are foreign born, and if you're not foreign born from another EU state, if you're born outside the EU and you're a young person, you are twice as likely as young people from the EU to be neither in employment or in education and training. You are much more likely to be outside of society. You have not joined, you have not assimilated. That's not true of our immigrants. You do not find that they are neither employed nor in education or training, even illegal immigrants.

And, per Nick, in addition to being on a slow road to nowhere — Neither in Employment or in Education and Training (NEET) — EuroNEETs are likely to nurture grievances, to complain more than their immigrant parents about prejudice, and to perceive societal injustices directed their way. Instinctively, if you’ve been paying attention, you know this is true. That, in part, is where the angry crowds of Hamas supporters are coming from in the UK and France (and elsewhere); it may well be where the new-found hostility to Israel and support for an institution and governance-free Palestinian state is coming from; and we should have little doubt this will over time transform the Europe that we know.

America is still different, for the moment. Assimilation is still achievable, and the overwhelming cohorts from the New World (Central and South America) are not so terribly dissimilar from, say, the Mexicans that dominated illegal immigration into the US until 2007. However, there are critical differences that require our attention. Check this out:

©AEI

Yep, today’s illegal immigrants are increasingly not even high school educated. The data suggest that unlike American dropouts, these folks are in the work force, and have a different work ethic than native born Americans who do not complete high school. But, that said, it is notable that this cohort has even fewer skills than their predecessors. What does that mean?

Let’s take another quick step back. One of the arguments that supporters of illegal immigration make is that actually, by virtue of the nature of the tax system, these men and women pour more into the nation’s coffers than they take out. But as Nick makes clear, though it is not easy to reckon all the numbers, no matter how you slice it, illegals are a net burden on the national fisc. Here’s what he writes in the report:

There is considerable disagreement about the fiscal impact of immigration in the USA. There is little doubt that that net impact depends upon the age and educational attainment of immigrants. But calculating net present value of income, tax revenue, and public benefit streams is devilishly difficult: not only for reasons of modeling complexity, but for the assumptions embodied. As we see here, Daniel DiMartino of Manhattan Institute and David Bier of Cato Institute arrive at dramatically different estimates of the net fiscal impact of immigration by age and education of immigrant cohorts—even though their work commences at the same starting point and relies on the same data sources. Both agree, however, that migrants with no more than a high school degree, when taken as a whole, cost the country more in public benefits than they contribute in taxes.

Is this nerdly stuff? You betcha, and that’s Nick’s sweet spot. Does it create an uglier picture of illegal immigration than we’ve been led to believe by the MSM over the years? Indeed, it does. But there’s an even more important byproduct of the Biden wave: If you, like me and Marc, believe that immigration is great, and that our diversity is a strength, and that we should have a better, stronger system of legal migration that continues to sustain this country, then you should know that Biden screwed us.

Support for legal migration to the United States has dropped like a stone, and the cause of that drop is the unrestricted, open border that prevailed when sad Grandpa Joe was president. Is that the right reaction? Possibly not, but it’s far from surprising. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the riots that are spreading from the People’s Democratic Republic of California aren’t going to help. Sigh.

Read the whole report, it’s an eye-opener. Or listen to the pod, Nick is awesome.

HIGHLIGHTS

Q: Tell us your main findings?

NE: We now have more a higher proportion of foreign-born in the United States, mainly legal, but including illegal. We have a higher proportion of foreign-born in the United States than we had even in the 1890s. We've never been where we are now in terms of the total proportion of foreign-born in the United States. Another thing which is important is that legal immigrants have a higher educational profile than native-born Americans, illegal immigrants, a much lower educational profile. Another point is that the United States now is an economy that really depends upon foreign-born labor, including illegal labor and snapping one's fingers and saying, "Be gone," might not be quite as easy from an economic standpoint as we might think. Finally, the surge of illegal immigration and the border chaos that deliberately allowed, deliberately instigated border chaos under the Biden administration had a huge impact on public support for all immigration, including legal immigration. I don't know that we could have done a much more brilliant job of poisoning American support for immigration than we did over the past four years, and that's going to take some repairing.

Q: Was it difficult to find reliable data?

NE: Not just in America, but in all affluent democracies with any appreciable migration in or out, the migration numbers are way worse than births or deaths. Those are collected easily. You figure out how much migration there was as a residual off of the things that you can trust, which is to say you take the number of people one year, the number of people the next year, you net out births and deaths, and then you have a number of net migrants. Now, if you have a surge like we have, then you're really in trouble in trying to estimate, guesstimate how many people have come into the country through the Census Bureau numbers because they do their month-to-month or year-to-year estimates based upon surveys, samples, like let's say for one of these reports, the current population survey. We use this for getting our employment numbers. It's got 60,000 households in it. How's that going to measure a surge like that? You're not going to do it terribly well.

A lot of the illegal immigrants also go home. The net number of increase in illegal immigrants, of illegal migrants in the US, is probably north of 4 million during the Biden administration. That's how many, you can substantiate through one or a number of Census Bureau surveys, but those aren't going to include necessarily the gotaways. They're not going to include people that border patrols never came across. It's probably not for another couple of years that we'll have a better sense of how many people came to our country as a legal entrants.

Q: There’s a wave of hostility to immigration — legal and illegal right now. Is that an anomaly?

NE: We had a huge surge of migration in the first gilded age, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s. At the same time that we had this huge surge, we also had this growing anti-migration movement, and we came within a hair of basically stopping foreign migration in 1905. We came very, very close to it. What finally stopped foreign migration? 1914, the war. But after the war, it didn't let up. After the war in the early 1920s, very strict legislation was put into effect limiting foreign migration to the United States, and that wasn't revisited and changed until the mid-1960s. What we're living with now didn't start until really the 1970s after that legislation.

Q: What were the drivers behind the earlier hostility to immigration to the US?

NE: Why did people want to limit migration in the first age of migration? Because a lot of unskilled foreign labor was coming into the United States, depressing the wage rates of native-born, less educated people at a time when there were big income gaps and wealth gaps developing in America. Does any of that sound familiar to you?

Until let's say 2021, we had generally strong support in the United States for legal migration, never had a lot of support for illegal migration, but over the past four years, that support has been very, very badly shaken, and I don't think that you need a psychiatrist to understand why this change of mood has taken place.

The United States took in an enormous number, in both absolute and proportional terms, took in an enormous number of people, obviously mainly from Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. All of that is true.

Q: What are the differences between migrants in Europe vs the US?

NE: I don't get into this in the paper in any deep way, but without mythologizing it or getting too Horatio Alger on anybody, we've got a pretty good record of assimilating people, and I compare our record of assimilation of migrants to the record in Europe over the last generation where they also have had a big surge of migration almost as high a proportion of foreign born in the EU now as in the US. But the results look a lot more promising, I would say, in the US than in a lot of Europe.

From what I have seen, and it's not in this study that I just released, we still seem to be doing, I think a pretty good job of assimilating immigrants from all sorts of different ethnicities from one generation to the next. You compare the Poles or the Italians in the late 19th century, early 20th century and English language and so forth, and jobs with immigrants who are coming in now, unlike Europe, foreign-born in the United States are more likely to be in the workforce than native-born Americans, and that's just a reality. When it gets to the welfare state, as you pointed out, the welfare state used to be like the welfare, one's community, one's family, one's friends. Now we've got this construct that will be affected one way or another by newcomers in the US.

Q: What’s the impact of welfare and other means tested assistance?

NE: Interesting work by the Center for Immigration Studies, which is a group that's generally supportive of tighter regulations on immigration, very good work, they've looked at the Census Bureau's data on what is neutrally called by the Census Bureau, program participation, and we'd call it welfare dependence. At any level of education, a foreign-born household, headed by a foreign-born person is more likely to be using means-tested benefits than a native-born family in the United States. And also those who are not naturalized citizens are more likely to be using these program benefits than those who are naturalized.

It is not a contradiction for immigrants coming to the United States to both be in the workforce and using a lot of US government programs. Part of what we haven't looked at I think nearly carefully enough is what the net fiscal impact is of foreign-born. I think there's a big debate about this among pro-immigration and skeptics or anti-immigration groups, if we're just going to be in stylized facts, I think it is generally true that the less educated, the older and the less educated the immigrants are, the more likely they're going to be a net burden on our fisc over time, not the budget solvers that we sometimes hear.

Q: Is our legal system a success?

NE: Our legal migration system, our shambolic legal migration system, arbitrary as it is dysfunctional as it is seems somehow to manage to bring in talent to the United States that is as a higher level of matriculated skills and education than the native born population. On top of this, and I didn't really get into this so much, but it's important to mention, the giant sucking sound that you hear is inventors from all over the world coming to the United States, and we have in the UN's world, Intellectual Property Organization database in their own whatever way, crackpot or precise way that it may be, they show, they identify people who they think have come up with significant inventions. That's their own system, but if you take a look at their numbers, net balance, there are only two countries in the world that are really big net recipients of inventors.

One is little Switzerland and the other is the United States of America. And if you try to put the United States of America on a chart with all of the other countries in the world, you can't because the US number is so high, it pops off of the chart.

Q: And how about illegal migration?

NE: There are these two aspects to our legal migration system. With respect to illegal migration, an enormous fraction, disproportionate fraction of illegal migrants have no high school diploma, no high school degrees. Now, put a footnote in there. These high school dropouts from abroad, and generally they're from New World, they're generally from Latin America, Central America, South America. The men in this group have workforce participation levels that are like college grads for the native-born US guys because there's a very hard work ethic there, but even this is affected by the welfare state. It's much lower workforce participation in California than in Texas, and that's a natural experiment we see in results from.

Q: Why the divide in workforce participation between American-born and even illegals?

NE: You've got completely different mentalities. You've got people who are raised in completely different ways. They're raised in different, separate countries, and when we mixed together, for example, numbers on labor force participation rates for people in America who are high school dropouts, we're averaging apples and oranges. When we're talking about men, for example, prime age men, it's a tragedy, it's a disaster for the native born men who are high school dropouts. Almost half of them aren't even in the workforce. It's not that the skills that are taught in 10th grade in El Salvador are so much better than the skills they're taught in the United States in 10th grade. That isn't what's happening. It's questions of motivation and behavior and values, outlook, mentality.

Q: Do we see that divide overseas as well?

NE: I would still make a distinction between the migrants, legal and illegal, who have come to the United States in let's say the last number of decades, and those who have come to Europe. Despite all of the problems that we had in the last four years of Biden administration, I think we have cohorts that we are going to be much more successful in assimilating.

There's a whole question in Europe, which is still apparently almost impossible for European intellectuals to talk about, which is the seemingly un-assimilable groups that they have brought in from Muslim-majority countries into particular European countries. It's not true of all Muslims. There are, the Indonesian migration into the Netherlands is very successful. How do I know that? Because you never hear anything about it. Likewise, Muslims from India in UK assimilated very well, even though Muslims from Pakistan have assimilated much less well. How come one part of the Raj is better than another? We would only know if people have the courage to investigate it, which evidently, they still do not.

Q: So Europe’s migrant story is a bigger fail than America’s?

NE: Here's a huge difference, and this does show up in the numbers that the European Union is willing to collect. In Europe today, in the EU 27, if you are foreign born, and if you're not foreign born from another EU state, if you're born outside the EU and you're a young person, you are twice as likely as young people from the EU to be neither in employment or in education and training. You are much more likely to be outside of society. You have not joined, you have not assimilated. That's not true of our immigrants. You do not find that they are neither employed nor in education or training, even illegal immigrants. The other thing which you see with the... Again, and this is all with EU data, with their surveys or with OECD surveys, not the first generation of immigrants, but the second generation of immigrants in the EU are much more likely to say that they are discriminated against, that they have been victimized. There's a dissatisfaction for the second generation of immigrants in Europe that you don't see with the US.

Q: Are extremist views and segregation into ethnic and national ghettoes affecting politics in Europe?

NE: I think there's a lot of reason to be worried about this in Europe. You have the combination of the poisoned intelligentsia and the left as the real existing left and a large and growing irredentist rejectionist population of descendants of people from Muslim majority countries in Europe.

And I think I have to automatically do a Miranda right thing, say thing and say, not all of them are part of this, but you only need one little phalange to ruin your whole day. That's what we've seen before, again and again, and again. When you have a city like London, which I'm told is one-sixth Muslim at this point, it matters. In the United States, I wouldn't want to be complacent about this because we do have our Daytons and we do have our Detroit areas and so forth, and our upstate New York outside of Buffalo stuff, it looks to me as if our politics are more driven by the Marxism for dummies, hard left, college washed. There, our real problem is we have taken so much money at universities from foreign governments that don't really wish us well, Middle Eastern governments, and this has created a beachhead in our universities for a lot of the poison that we're seeing nowadays.

Q: Are there other differences between Europe and the US?

NE: Part of what makes it harder to assimilate now, I think in Europe is government policy, which tries to create and support communities rather than to assimilate people into a national mix.

It's clear that many places they haven't done it as well as the United States. And the United States isn't unique. Canada's pretty good. Australia's pretty good. The overseas British offshoots, I think have done an awfully good job in different areas of the world. We have had this temptation in our politics and in our welfare state politics to Balkanize groups that come and to encourage bilingualism in a way where people may not end up speaking English, even though that's like your ticket to be part of the American creed and canon.

Our welfare state policies aren't as generous as the European ones, and as the European friends never stop telling us. But that also I think is probably going to hasten the crisis of the European welfare state inadvertently because they thought they were bringing in all of these workers to postpone the crisis of the welfare state. But disproportionately, these were people who didn't have the labor force participation of native-borns, didn't have the educational profile of native-borns with a heavily progressive welfare state, big welfare state, this turbocharges things. And you're really going to see it when all of this generation of immigrants retires and starts drawing much more than they put in from the European fisc.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

The Tech Recruitment Ruse That Has Avoided Trump’s Crackdown on Immigration (Alec MacGillis, ProPublica, June 3^rd, 2025)

D.H.S. Requests 20,000 National Guard Members to Help With Immigration Crackdown (Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, May 15^th, 2025

Judge Blocks Trump’s Ban on Foreign Students at Harvard (Douglas Belkin, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2025)

Deportation Flights Reach Highest Level Under Trump So Far (Albert Sun & Brent McDonald, The New York Times, June 3, 2025)

Trump Bans Citizens of 12 Countries From Traveling to the U.S. (Michelle Haffman, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2025)

ICE officers stuck in Djibouti shipping container with deported migrants (The Washington Post, Maria Sacchetti, June 5, 2025)

Trump administration ending protected status for Nepalese migrants (Ryan Patrick Jones, Reuters, June 5, 2025)

Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program (Abbie VanSickle & Adam Liptak, The New York Times, May 30, 2025)

Working Paper

America’s Immigration Mess: An Illustrated Guide (Nicholas Eberstadt & Patrick Norrick, AEI Foreign and Defense Policy Working Paper Series, May 29, 2025)

Population Work

Global Population Decline and American Immigration Policy (Nicholas Eberstadt, Garden State Immigration Policy Webinar, May 8, 2025)

Workforce Participation for Older Americans: Warning Lights Flashing (Nicholas Eberstadt, AEIdeas, May 07, 2025)

Discussing older worker dropping out of the labor force: Eberstadt on ABC Australia’s ‘Planet America’ (Nicholas Eberstadt, ABC Australia’s Planet America, May 30, 2025)

Global Fertility Rates

Iran’s Seemingly Unstoppable Birth Slump (Nicholas Eberstadt, Middle East Forum Observer, May 21, 2025)

Commentary

Trump’s Crackdown on Foreign Students Threatens to Disrupt the Pipeline of Inventors (Paul Kiernan, WSJ, June 4, 2025)