As POTUS Donald Trump was preparing to bring his “America First” message to the world during his second address to the United Nations this week, professors at Yale University rolled out the results of a highly controversial new study that will only bolster the president’s quest to ‘re-Americanize’ America.
For years, experts who study illegal immigration for a living settled on a figure of about 11-12 million people living unlawfully inside the United States at any given time. While substantial, that figure pales in comparison to new statistics cited in the Yale study, the Washington Times reported.
According to Yale researchers, there are actually between 16 and 30 million illegals in the country -- the highest number being close to 10 percent of the population, a figure that is reverberating through immigration reform policy circles.
The Times noted:
The professors’ model looked at estimates of how many people came illegally, and how many people likely left, and concluded there are a lot more people who arrived than the 11 million suggested by traditional estimates. The model says the most likely figure is double that, at about 22 million.
If true, the numbers would mean U.S. officials have done a poorer job of catching illegal immigrants than imagined, and that one out of every nine people living in the U.S. is here illegally.
“Policy debates about the amount of resources to devote to this issue, and the merits of alternative policies, including deportation, amnesty, and border control, depend critically on estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which sets the scale of the issue,” said research Professors Jonathan S. Feinstein and Edward H. Kaplan, as well as postdoctoral associate Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, all with the Yale School of Management.
Their findings, published in the academic journal PLOS ONE, have gotten no small amount of pushback, both from immigration reform advocates and critics as well as demographers, the Times noted.
But the Yale study appears to support, if not directly coincide, with other recent findings regarding the number of immigrants – legal and otherwise – in the U.S.
Disputed data
The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration overall, said in a recent report that analyzed data from the 2017 American Community Surveil (ACS) compiled by the Census Bureau says the country’s legal and illegal immigrant population is around 44.5 million, the highest number in U.S. history and representing about 1 in 7 residents.
“Growth was led by immigrants from Latin American countries other than Mexico, as well as Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa,” CIS said in a press release. “The number from Mexico, Europe and Canada either remained flat or declined since 2010.”
Notes CIS’ director of research and the report’s co-author, Steven Camarota, “America continues to experience the largest wave of mass immigration in our history. The decline in Mexican immigrants has been entirely offset by immigration from the rest of the world. By 2027, the immigrant share will hit its highest level in U.S. history, and continue to rise.”
Not everyone is buying into the new Yale findings.
“We believe these new numbers represent at most an interesting academic exercise, but are ultimately greatly off-base and thus counterproductive to the public’s very real need to understand the true scope of illegal immigration and how best to address it,” analysts at the Migration Policy Institute, who were asked to peer-review the findings, said.
Interestingly, during his 2016 campaign, POTUS Trump said the illegal immigrant figure could be as high as 30 million, a figure for which he was roundly ‘fact-checked’ and criticized. Turns out he may have been right. (Related: Majority of Americans side with TRUMP on border wall, illegal immigration.)
Either way, demographers and historians worth their salt have observed that taking in so many people from different cultures and often competing values is putting American traditions at risk of dying out. They say we should ‘pause’ immigration for at least a few decades to allow those already here to assimilate.
Read more about the invasion of illegal aliens into the U.S. at InvasionUSA.news.
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