Last year saw the highest migrant death toll on record, with at least 8,938 people dying on migration routes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
“These numbers are a tragic reminder that people risk their lives when insecurity, lack of opportunity, and other pressures leave them with no safe or viable options at home,” IOM chief Amy Pope said in a statement.
The report by her UN agency found that nearly three-quarters of all migrant deaths and disappearances recorded globally since 2014 occurred as people fled insecurity, conflict, disaster and other humanitarian crises.
One in four were “from countries affected by humanitarian crises, with the deaths of thousands of Afghans, Rohingya, and Syrians documented on migration routes worldwide,” said the IOM’s Missing Migrants Report.
The report said that more than 52,000 people died while trying to escape from one of the 40 countries in the world where the UN has a crisis response plan or humanitarian response plan in place.
Pope urged international investment “to create stability and opportunity within communities, so that migration is a choice, not a necessity.”
“And when staying is no longer possible, we must work together to enable safe, legal, and orderly pathways that protect lives.”
The Central Mediterranean remains the deadliest migration route in the world, with nearly 25,000 people lost at sea in the past decade, IOM said.
More than 12,000 of those had been lost at sea after departing from war-torn Libya, with countless others disappearing while transiting the Sahara Desert, the report said.
More than 5,000 people died while trying to leave crisis-ravaged Afghanistan in the past decade, many of them since the Taliban retook power in 2021.
And more than 3,100 members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority had died during the period, many in shipwrecks or while crossing into Bangladesh.
“Too often, migrants fall through the cracks,” warned Julia Black, coordinator of IOM’s Missing Migrants Project and author of the report.
“And due to data gaps — especially in war zones and disaster areas — the true death toll is likely far higher than what we’ve recorded,” she said in the statement.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that as of January 2022, 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the U.S. That’s up from the 10.5 million estimated in January 2020.
DHS and immigration groups usually publish these estimates annually. Every group has its own methodology, but collectively, the groups rely on data from the Census Bureau, some specifically use its annual American Community Survey, which documents changes in population, workforce and housing.
The groups calculate their figures by subtracting the number of immigrants legally in the country from the total number of foreign-born people. Then the groups estimate how many people are undercounted. That final number is their estimate of people illegally in the country.
After remaining largely unchanged for more than a decade, the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally has risen under President Joe Biden’s administration. But not by as much as Rubio says.
“The methodology and data being used by demographers today provides strong statistical evidence that the undocumented population residing in the United States in January 2022 was about 11 (million) to 12 million,” said Robert Warren, a demographer and senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, a think tank studying international migration.
Here are immigration groups’ recent estimates of the number of people illegally in the U.S. They issued their estimates from November 2023 to March 2024:
11.2 million in 2021, up from 11 million in 2019, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
10.5 million in 2021, up from 10.2 million in 2019, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
10.9 million in 2022, up from 10.3 million in 2021, the Center for Migration Studies of New York.
12.3 million in May 2023, up from 10.2 million in January 2021, the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank favoring low immigration levels. Steven Camarota, the center’s research director, recently provided PolitiFact with a preliminary estimate of 14 million people in the country illegally as of March 2024.
16.8 million in 2023, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group advocating for reduced immigration.
Why immigration encounters alone can’t predict the unauthorized immigrant population
Under Biden’s administration, immigration officials have encountered immigrants trying to illegally cross the border more than 9.5 million times.
But that doesn’t mean that nearly 10 million more people are now living in the U.S. illegally.
Encounters represent events, not people. If one person tries to enter the country three different times and is stopped each time by border officials, for example, that equals three encounters, even if it’s the same person encountered.
“It’s too simple to suggest based on record arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border that the unauthorized population is swelling by many millions of people,” Mittelstadt said.
Also, not everyone encountered illegally crossing the border is allowed to settle in the U.S. As of January 2024, the latest month with available data under Biden, around 3.9 million encounters had resulted in people being removed, returned or expelled from the U.S.
Besides encounters, DHS estimates that about 391,000 people have evaded border authorities. (The latest “got-aways” data DHS has published is for fiscal year 2021, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, and includes about four months of the Trump administration.)
Also, the number of people living in the U.S. illegally isn’t affected just by people entering the U.S. The figure isn’t static, the Migration Policy Institute said in a March analysis. People die, leave the U.S. or change immigration status.
Rubio said the number of people in the U.S. illegally is “upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million.”
The number of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. has increased under Biden’s administration after remaining stable for years. But it is not as high as Rubio says. Most immigration groups that estimate this population agree the number ranges around 11 million to 12 million people, despite differences in methodologies. The highest estimate is 16.8 million.
Immigration officials don’t let in everyone they encounter, agents have expelled migrants millions of times under Biden. And the number of people living illegally in the U.S. is not static; it fluctuates as people die, leave the U.S. or change their immigration status. Adding the number of border stops under Biden to the estimated number of people already here illegally won’t produce an accurate total.
