The number of immigrants in the United States appears to be shrinking for the first time since the 1960s, with the population dropping by approximately one million people in just six months, even as the unauthorised immigrant population reached a record-setting 14 million two years ago, the Pew Research Center said in new reports released Thursday.
In January, the US immigrant population hit 53.3 million, the largest in the country’s history at 15.8 per cent of the total population. Six months later, it appears to have shrunk by a million people to 51.9 million, or 15.4 per cent of the population. “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 labour force, which lost over 750,000 workers since January, according to Pew, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and data analysis institute. “The US 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. “This is really the first time we’ve seen a drop like this,” said Passel, who noted it’s difficult to say whether the drop will be consistent through the rest of the year.
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.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has arrested over 158,000 illegal aliens in 2025 alone, including more than 600 members of Tren de Aragua. Under President Trump, US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is targeting the worst of the worst, with 75 per cent of their arrests being criminal illegal aliens with convictions or pending charges.
Early data shows what appeared to be a 2024 slowdown and then a 2025 decline in what is tagged as the unauthorised population, which is a mix of people illegally in the country 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.
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, Passel noted. 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.
Immigrants who have become US citizens through the naturalisation process make up the largest share of the overall immigrant population at 46 per cent, or 23.8 million. They are followed by 14 million “unauthorised” immigrants, or 27 per cent; 11.9 million lawful permanent residents (green card holders), or 23 per cent; and 2.1 million temporary lawful residents, or 4 per cent, 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 per cent of the population, and they are three-quarters of the population in the United Arab Emirates.
Immigrants in the United States with some, but not full, protection from deportation drove the two-year increase in the unauthorised 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 unauthorised population hit a previous high of 12.2 million, and about 500,000 people had protection from deportation.
President Joe Biden’s halt of asylum applications in late 2024 and suspension of parole programmes, such as the Cuba, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan programme that he created to blunt masses of immigrants arriving at the border, appeared to considerably slow the growth of the unauthorised population in the United States, according to Pew’s report.
This year, the unauthorised population has begun to decline because of increased deportations and the removal of deportation protections by Trump, Pew said. But the unauthorised population appears to still be above the 2023 levels, based on incomplete data.
Trump ended the humanitarian parole programme for those four countries in an executive order signed on his first day in office, instructing the Department of Homeland Security to “terminate all categorical parole programs that are contrary to the policies of the United States.” Since 2023, 531,690 people had been granted humanitarian parole under the programme, according to DHS, with the majority coming from Haiti.
Other notable findings from the Pew Research Center include that during 2021-23, when there were record influxes of immigrants, the United States also had record low unemployment. New unauthorised immigrants are coming from different places than in the past, increasingly from South America rather than Mexico or Central America.
Whilst 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’ unauthorised population increased more than California’s from 2021 to 2023.
The Center for Immigration Studies preliminarily estimated that the illegal immigrant population declined an astonishing 1.6 million (10 per cent) from January to July of this year, though these figures await confirmation. The Trump administration has claimed that around 140,000 people had been deported as of April 2025, though some estimates put the number at roughly half that amount.
As the Trump administration continues its immigration crackdown, the full impact of these policy shifts won’t be known until more complete data becomes available. However, the current trends suggest a historic reversal in US immigration patterns not seen in over half a century.
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Image Credit (Shortened):
Donald Trump dancing the “Trump Dance” (23 August 2024, Glendale, AZ) – by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY‑SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. (commons.wikimedia.org)
