By Christopher Ingraham March 3 at 5:59
Donald Trump's tough talk on illegal immigration has been the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Among other things, he has promised to deport all illegal immigrants back to their countries of origin (estimated price tag: $114 billion, according to the Center for American Progress) and build a wall along the Southwestern border that Mexico will pay for.
Republican voters — and some Democrats — have been receptive to this message. A December CNN poll found that Republicans rated Trump most highly on his ability to handle the immigration issue. A September Washington Post/ABC poll found that one-third of all voters — Democrats and Republicans alike — supported his immigration proposals.
But as Trump ratcheted up his immigration rhetoric, it was easy to overlook a key fact: Data from various sources suggest that illegal immigration, particularly across the Southwest border, is at or near its lowest level in decades.
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In fiscal 2015, for instance, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 331,000 peopletrying to cross the Southwest border, a drop of about 30 percent year-over-year. It's the second-lowest number of Southwest border apprehensions since 1972 — only 2011 had a lower number. It's also a steep decline from the number of Southwest border apprehensions at their peak in 2000, when the Border Patrol arrested 1.6 million would-be migrants.
Apprehensions, of course, are only one part of the illegal immigration picture. It's unclear what percentage of migration attempts actually succeed. Fewer apprehensions could reflect fewer migration attempts, shifting policy priorities, or better evasion techniques by would-be migrants.
But other pieces of data support the idea that illegal immigration is falling. A 2015 Pew Research Center analysis found that after decades of growth, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has leveled off and fallen slightly from its peak in 2007.
Pew Research Center
Illegal immigration "dropped sharply during the Great Recession of 2007-09, mainly because of a decrease in immigration from Mexico," Pew's researchers wrote. "The overall estimate has fluctuated little in recent years because the number of new unauthorized immigrants is roughly equal to the number who are deported, leave the U.S. on their own, convert to legal status, or (in a small number of cases) die." Percentage-wise, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States fell from about 4.1 percent of the total population in 2007 to 3.5 percent of the population in 2014, according to census figures and Pew's estimates.
And research indicates that the flow of Mexican immigrants — the group about which Trump has been most outspoken — has actually reversed in recent years. In November, Pew's demographers released a report finding that "more Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico from the U.S. than have migrated here since the end of the Great Recession." From 2009 to 2014, roughly 1 million Mexicans and their families left the United States for Mexico, while only 870,000 Mexican nationals left Mexico to come to the United States, Pew found.
Pew Research Center
Flows of illegal immigrants are factored into Pew's calculations, which are based primarily on data from the U.S. census and the Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics, a national household survey in Mexico. The net decrease in immigrants from 2009 to 2014 is a sharp reversal from the period between 1995 and 2000, when nearly 2.3 million net Mexican immigrants were in the United States.
All of this adds up to a rather discordant empirical backdrop to the intense focus on immigration during the 2016 campaign. As a percentage of the total population, illegal immigrants in the country are declining. More Mexicans are leaving.
And yet the GOP front-runner has effectively made the issue the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Perversely, Trump's stringent immigration rhetoric may have fueled a small surge in immigration attempts late last year, as would-be migrants tried to cross before a presumptive Trump administration made it more difficult. But those numbers appear to have fallen in recent months.
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