The number of immigrants in the United States appears to be shrinking for the first time since the 1960s — though the population of unauthorized immigrants reached a record-setting 14 million just two years ago, the Pew Research Center said in new reports released Thursday.
In January, the U.S. immigrant population hit 53.3 million, the largest in the country’s history. Six months later, it appears to have shrunk by a million people, to 51.9 million.
“The data we are looking at represented a dramatic change,” said Jeffrey Passel, the Pew Research Center’s senior demographer.
The reduction is reflected in the labor force, which lost over 750,000 workers since January, according to Pew, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and data analysis institute.
“The U.S. population of working-age people isn’t growing. That means the only way the workforce can grow is from new immigrants coming in,” Passel said. “If the workforce isn’t growing, it’s harder for the economy.”
The reduction is the result of immigration policy changes at the border that began in 2024, during the Biden administration, and the immigration crackdown President Donald Trump imposed since he took office this year, Pew said.
The Trump administration’s amplified immigration crackdown has led to increased arrests and detentions of immigrants and citizens at homes and worksites and in the streets. It has also led to curtailments of legal immigration with stepped-up scrutiny for visa applicants, cutoffs of refugee entries, travel bans and new procedural barriers for legal migration.
“This is really the first time we’ve seen a drop like this,” said Passel, who said it’s difficult to say whether the drop will be consistent through the rest of the year.
Early data shows what appeared to be a 2024 slowdown and then a 2025 decline in what is tagged as the unauthorized population, which is a mix of people illegally here and people who had some form of protection from deportation, such as Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, known as DACA.
Passel noted that the sample used for the census survey to provide the snapshot of the current immigration population isn’t very large, so data pointing to the decline this year is preliminary and incomplete.
Pew said the decline may be partly artificial because of a declining response rate by immigrants to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, on which the Pew data is based.
Immigrants who have become U.S. citizens through the naturalization process make up the largest share of the overall immigrant population, 46%, or 23.8 million.
They are followed by 14 million “unauthorized” immigrants, or 27%; 11.9 million lawful permanent residents (green card holders), or 23%; and 2.1 million temporary lawful residents, or 4%, who have permission to be in the United States for a limited time, usually for study or work.
Despite the decline in the overall immigrant population, the United States continues to have more immigrants than any other country, but it is outmatched by several other countries that have higher proportions of immigrants in their populations. In Canada, immigrants are 22% of the population, and they are three-quarters of the population in the United Arab Emirates.
Immigrants were 15.8% of the U.S. population in January, which fell to 15.4% in June, Pew said.
Immigrants with some protection from deportation drove record high
Immigrants in the United States with some, but not full, protection from deportation drove the two-year increase in the unauthorized population to a record high of 14 million in 2023, Pew reported.
That took place after an influx of 3.5 million people over two years — which Pew said was the largest consistent increase on record.
About 6 million people were in the United States without full protection from deportation in 2023 — up from 2.7 million in 2021, according to Pew.
That compares to 2012, when the unauthorized population hit a previous high of 12.2 million, and about 500,000 people had protection from deportation.
Early data, however, shows that the increase appears to have slowed in 2024 and declined this year.
President Joe Biden’s halt of asylum applications in late 2024 and suspension of parole programs, such as the Cuba, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan program that he created to blunt masses of immigrants arriving at the border, appeared to considerably slow the growth of the unauthorized population in the United States, according to Pew’s report.
This year, the unauthorized population has begun to decline because of increased deportations and the removal of deportation protections by Trump, Pew said. But the unauthorized population appears to still be above the 2023 levels, based on incomplete data.
Other notable findings:
During 2021-23, when there were record influxes of immigrants, the United States also had record low unemployment.
New unauthorized immigrants are coming from different places than in the past, increasingly from South America rather than Mexico or Central America.
While California still leads in the number of immigrants (2.3 million) and Texas remains second (2.1 million), the gap between them had closed from about 1.2 million in 2007 to about 200,000 now. Texas’ unauthorized population increased more than California’s from 2021 to 2023.
