(National Sentinel) Security: While it may not seem like it given the headlines of caravan migrants and border incursions, the number of illegal immigrants currently living in the United States has actually hit its lowest level in a decade, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.
Using data from 2016, the center credited the decrease in a lower number of people entering illegally from Mexico — which could also be traced back to the election of POTUS Donald Trump.
According to Pew, 10.7 million illegal aliens were living in the U.S. in 2016, which was the lowest level since 2004. Also, the 2016 figure is down from a peak of 12.2 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2007.
The data show that between 2007 and 2016, the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. fell by 13 percent, even as the number of legal immigrants grew by 22 percent during the same period.
“The declining overall number of unauthorized immigrants is due mainly to a very large drop in the number of new unauthorized immigrants, especially Mexicans, coming into the country,” Pew noted in its report.
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“Consequently, today’s unauthorized immigrant population includes a smaller share of recent arrivals, especially from Mexico, than a decade earlier.”
Though President Obama became known as the “Deporter-in-Chief,” Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of global migration and demography research, told USA Today that the U.S. government’s expansion of security along the southwest border has deterred many immigrants from trying to cross it illegally.
The Tump administration continues to battle Congress and the courts in its effort to protect and defend our borders, but according to these latest figures, it appears as though the president’s policies are succeeding to a degree.
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