The rise of foreign-born under Biden

I’ve posted several times about foreign-born entry trends in the Biden administration. It’s complicated because of Biden’s aggressive use of temporary visas.  I estimated in May that the total increase of foreign-born under Biden was five million. This level might be composed of a net increase by green cards of 2.5 million, two million asylum applicants, and the parole and TPS persons. (This adds to more than five million.)

Here in Pew Research’s latest take as of July 22:

Pending asylum claims: they stood at 2.1 million in Sept 2021. On June 2024, they were 3.2 million. During the Trump years, the backlog grew by about 700,000; under Biden to date,1.9 million.

Parole: through December 2023, about 500,000 new immigrants were paroled into the country through two federal programs – the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan (CHNV) program and Uniting for Ukraine (U4U). Groups like these have traditionally been considered part of the unauthorized immigrant population, but almost none of them appear in the 2022 estimates.

Popularly defined as unauthorized:  These are people who crossed illegally or were overstays.  In 2008, they totaled about 12.2 million.  Since 2007, the Mexican component of this population dropped by nearly 3 million, from 6.9 million to 4 million. It is not clear at all if this population has recovered from this decline by other nationalities.

Pew’s figures infer, but to do state explicitly, that what we can call irregular persons has shifted significantly to those given temporary authorization to live in the U.S. They include asylum applicants, Parolees, Temporary Protected Status ( roughly 600,000 increase under Biden), and DACA (basically no change under Biden.

 

 

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