Births to Illegal Immigrants and Temporary Visitors

[Editor’s note: This revised version of a January 24 blog includes births to temporary visitors as well as to illegal immigrants.]

Under a day-one executive order signed by President Trump, children born to illegal immigrants or legal temporary visitors will no longer receive birthright citizenship. How many such children are born in the U.S. each year? We have not formally updated our estimates since publishing 2018 and 2019 reports on births to illegal immigrants and temporary visitors, respectively. It will take some time to investigate changes in the characteristics of the foreign-born population due to the Biden border surge, along with the extent to which the Census surveys truly reflect those changes. We can offer some preliminary estimates, however.

Illegal Immigrants

Assuming that births to illegal immigrants as a proportion of births to all noncitizens has held roughly constant since our last report, we estimate that there were 225,000 to 250,000 births to illegal immigrants in 2023, amounting to close to 7 percent of births in the U.S. We will revise these numbers as we obtain more data.

We do not expect a large upward revision in this 2023 estimate, however, because the CDC has recorded a fairly steady number of births in the U.S. during this decade. The CDC believes that it captures nearly all births, and illegal immigrant parents in particular have the incentive to register their children’s births in order to obtain birth certificates and citizenship.

Up to a quarter-million births to illegal immigrants is hardly trivial. It appears to be more than the number of births to legal noncitizens, and it is greater than the total number of births in all but two states taken individually. Although not yet available, the 2024 numbers are likely to be even higher.

Temporary Visitors

Guestworkers, foreign students, exchange participants, and members of the diplomatic corps¹ are legally present in the U.S., but must leave when their temporary visas expire. (We refer to them as “temporary visitors” here, but they are also sometimes called “nonimmigrants”.) We would not expect this group to have a high birth rate, for several reasons. They are generally well educated, they come disproportionately from countries such as China that have low birth rates to begin with, and only 43 percent are women.

Nevertheless, because the number of temporary visitors present in the U.S. likely exceeds three million,² the number of births to this group is not negligible. We estimate about 70,000 births to temporary visitors in 2023. Furthermore, if we assume, based on past experience, that births equal about 2 percent of the total temporary visitor population each year, then there have been close to 500,000 births to temporary visitors over the past decade.

As with our estimate of births to illegal immigrants, caveats apply. The last report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the characteristics of temporary visitors covers 2019. We must use data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to extrapolate from the 2019 administrative data to generate 2023 estimates.³ We will update them when DHS publishes new data.

End Notes

¹ Under longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” requirement, children of diplomats with full diplomatic immunity are not entitled to birthright citizenship. However, most members of the diplomatic corps do not enjoy full immunity, and so the U.S.-born children of these individuals have traditionally been awarded American citizenship by birthright. See our 2019 report for a longer discussion.

² After falling during the pandemic, the temporary visitor population appears to have recovered by 2023. The number of foreign students, for example, was nearly the same in 2023 as it was in 2019.

³ Specifically, we identify a proxy population of women in the ACS who have characteristics typical of temporary visitors — ages 18-44, arrived in the three years prior to the survey, at least some college — and calculate the ratio of 2023 population size to 2019 population size for each sending country. We multiply that ratio by the DHS count of temporary visitors from each country in 2019 to establish our temporary visitor count in 2023. We then multiply each country’s population count by its birth rate in the proxy population to estimate the number of births. Our strongest assumption is that the birth rate of the proxy population will match the birth rate of actual temporary visitors. If those two rates differ substantially, then our estimates could be off.