The United States’ illegal immigrant population has plummeted by an estimated 1.6 million in the first half of this year — a record-setting decline attributed to the Trump administration’s aggressive interior immigration enforcement, according to a new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler found the total foreign-born population — legal and illegal — dropped by an unprecedented 2.2 million between January and July. The majority of that decrease came from illegal immigrants, representing a 10% reduction in just six months, from 15.8 million down to roughly 14.2 million.
“This is the largest six-month decline ever recorded within the same year,” the researchers noted. While naturalized U.S. citizens have seen modest growth, non-citizens have accounted for the entire decline in the foreign-born population.
The drop coincides with labor market shifts showing that recent job gains have gone entirely to native-born Americans, while foreign-born employment has fallen.
CIS suggests that while some employers may be frustrated by a reduced supply of undocumented workers, the tightening labor pool could boost wages for less-educated U.S.-born and legal immigrant workers — and potentially pull millions of sidelined American men without college degrees back into the workforce.
