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Briefing|The Largest Immigration Surge in U.S. History
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/the-largest-immigration-surge-in-us-history.html
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My colleagues and I worked with government officials and outside experts in recent weeks to analyze the magnitude of the recent immigration surge in the United States. We published the results of that analysis this morning.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll give you seven highlights, with help from charts by Albert Sun, a graphics editor at The Times.
1. The immigration surge since 2021 has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing even the levels of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Total net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — will likely exceed eight million people over the past four years, government statistics suggest. That number includes both legal and illegal immigration.
Never before has annual net migration been close to two million for an extended period, according to data from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Budget Office.
2. Even after adjusting for today’s larger population, the surge is slightly larger than that during the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. This chart tells that story:
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3. The share of the U.S. population born in another country has reached a record high as a result. That share hit 15.2 percent in the summer of 2023 (and continued rising over the past 18 months). The previous high of 14.8 percent occurred in 1890, and the share remained high for decades afterward.
