Lawmakers are pressuring the Biden administration to reveal the true number of migrants living in the US, which experts say is at least 22 MILLION
A group of 18 Republican lawmakers are demanding that President Joe Biden’s administration make public how many illegal immigrants are living in the US
Studies from 2018 claim that as many as 22 million people live in the US without legal statusbut other more recent estimates from 2021 say the number is closer to 11 million.
But members of Congress want a more precise and accurate representation of the percentage of the population made up of illegal immigrants and migrants without documented status.
Republican Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Nancy Mace (SC), Bob Good (Va.), Dusty Johnson (SD), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Ralph Norman (VA.) and a dozen other lawmakers co-signed a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), Alejandro Mayorkas.
Republican lawmakers are demanding that President Joe Biden’s administration reveal how many illegal immigrants are living in the US
The latest US government estimates claim that 11 million people in the US are in the country illegally β but with the growing migrant crisis at the southern border, Republicans believe the number is much higher
β(A)s January 2018, 11.4 million illegal aliens resided in the U.S.,β the letter reads. “Since January 2021, the border crisis in the Southwest has reached a peak not seen in recent history, and at least 4.7 million illegal aliens have been released into the interior under the Biden administration’s policies.”
‘We are therefore writing to request an immediate update to the report, using the most recent data available.’
In addition to wanting to know the total illegal immigration population, the letter also demands that Mayorkas hand over data breaking down undocumented immigrants by category.
Lawmakers want DHS to release the “number of aliens who have overstayed their visas” and “the number of aliens who have been paroled and released into the country.”
Additionally, the group of Republicans wants to understand what data DHS currently has on the number of “escapees” currently in the country. This refers to the number of migrants who were able to avoid arrest or evade detection when they entered the US illegally.
A group of 18 Republican members of Congress signed a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting the latest data on illegal immigrants living in the US
Pew Research estimates, based on available data, that there were 10.5 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2021 β about 3 percent of the total population and 22 percent of the foreign-born population.
But a paper by a researcher at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from years earlier β in 2018 β estimates that the number is actually around 22 million.
With the increase in illegal immigration since President Biden took office in January 2021, most critics argue that it is impossible for the population of illegal immigrants to be less than 20 million.