According to a report from the Pew Research Center published in August, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States surged from a low of 10.2 million in 2019 to 14 million by the end of 2023.
Of that total population, about 4.2 million had been in the country for less than five years , another 3.8 million had been in the country for 5 to 17 years, and another 4.3 million had been in the country for 18 or more years.
First, the newer set.
Many of the newer immigrants are people who fled socialist tyranny in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and were given work permits and temporary protection from deportation. Many others were from the perpetually devastated nation of Haiti, who were also given temporary protections and work permits.
Once upon a time, victims of socialism were people Republicans saw as natural allies, but at some point the American right decided it didn’t really care about them except as a rhetorical cudgel against Democrats. So, Trump sought to remove their protections and deport them.
And, in one of the dumbest and most obviously racist postr taken by a presidential candidate, at some point Republicans became fixated on the idea that Haitian migrants were stealing pets for food in the Midwest. Following up on this, Trump likewise moved to strip away protections for Haitian migrants.
Then, there are the people who have been here a really long time. Again, most of the population of illegal immigrants in the country are people who have been here a long time. In 2019, Pew reported that upwards of two-thirds of illegal immigrants had been in the country for a decade or longer.
There are the immigration hardliners who insist that “illegal means illegal” and so everyone has to go, no exceptions. And, sure, there’s a logic to it. Laws are laws, laws should be followed to the absolute limit, and, if you don’t like it, change the law. As applied to illegal immigration: people in the country illegally broke the law and so they should leave or face punishment, no exceptions.
First, this argument faces a practical reality: 14 million people, and counting, is a lot of people. A lot. For all of the upset and tumult of the ongoing deportations of the Trump administration, the Department of Homeless Security projects that about 600,000 deportations will take place by the end of the year. It doesn’t take more than elementary math to see that, even if this pace is carried through the entirety of Trump’s final term, it won’t even erase the gains in the illegal immigrant population from 2019 to 2023.
That aside, there’s a broader problem with the absolutist position: It assumes that because something is law that it is right and that because something is in violation of the law that it is wrong.
A major reason so many people have chosen to come here and live here illegally is that there’s no other way for them to come here legally. The reasons they want to come here isn’t to harm Americans, but to work, raise families and even be Americans.
As Pew notes, about 9.7 million of the 14 million illegal immigrants in the country were in the labor force in 2023, with many of the rest being children or elderly (because, again, a large chunk of them have been in the country for two decades now).
Reinforcing the point that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants are fundamentally decent people is the fact that the vast majority of people being caught up in the Trump administration’s deportation scheme don’t have a criminal record.
So, sure, in some sense the Trump administration is just rigorously enforcing the law, but are these laws just? Is tearing up families and sending good, working people away really the right thing to do? Can we not do better than this?
A rational immigration system that makes it much easier for people to legally live and work in America, and which prioritizes the removal of actual criminals, isn’t hard to fathom. But so far, it seems the Trump administration is less interested in long-term solutions than inflicting as much damage as it can.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com