Politics
NEW: Trump’s Migration Crackdown Crushes 90-Year Trend As Foreign-Born Population Plummets
America’s foreign-born population has plunged by an estimated 2.9 million since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, potentially snapping a migration trend that had endured since the 1930s.
The dramatic reversal came after the foreign-born population swelled by 8.3 million during the four years before January 2025, according to a new Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the federal government’s monthly household survey.
CIS found that the population dropped by 2.9 million between January 2025 and July 2026. That figure includes naturalized citizens, green card holders, illegal immigrants, and people living in the country on long-term temporary visas.
The group preliminarily estimated that the illegal immigrant population accounted for most of the decline, falling by 2.3 million during that period.
“The best data we have shows an enormous decrease in the total foreign-born population, with most of the falloff among illegal immigrants,” said Steven Camarota, CIS director of research and the report’s lead author. “Regaining control of the border and robust interior enforcement has partly undone the huge increase in the illegal immigration that took place during the border surge.”
If the findings hold, net migration to the United States was negative over the past year and a half for the first time in roughly nine decades.
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The decline was concentrated entirely among noncitizens from Latin America who arrived in the United States in 1980 or later, according to the analysis. CIS noted that the group significantly overlaps with the country’s illegal immigrant population.
Researchers estimated that the number of illegal immigrants living in the US fell from 15.8 million in January 2025 to 13.5 million in July 2026.
That net drop factors in new migrants entering the country as well as deportations, voluntary departures, immigrants obtaining legal status, and deaths.
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The reduction did not translate into an equally steep loss of labor. Just 44% of those included in the falling foreign-born population were workers, while the remainder were children, senior citizens and other people outside the workforce.
Employment gains among US-born workers also softened the effect on the labor market, CIS found. Those factors could help explain why surveys of American businesses have not recorded a comparably dramatic drop in the number of workers.
The report cautioned that at least some of the measured decline could stem from immigrants becoming less willing to participate in government surveys rather than leaving the country.
CIS said, however, that it found no clear evidence of such a shift. Survey response rates did not track with changes in the size of the foreign-born population, while the share of participants who declined to answer immigration-related questions remained both low and stable.
