The Curious Debate Over ‘Self-Deportation’

On August 12, my colleagues Steve Camarota and Karen Zeigler issued a widely cited report, preliminarily estimating that the illegal immigrant population in the United States declined by 1.6 million between January and July. DHS picked up on that report, and now a few critics are questioning whether it’s accurate. It’s a curious debate, particularly given that similar assessments went unchallenged in recent years, but here are my conclusions from three-decades-plus in immigration: (1) not every alien — let alone those who come illegally — remains forever; (2) most aliens come illegally to work and stop working only when they either can’t work or leave; and (3) enforcement works.

“Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July”

That report, “Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July”, was the product of analysis Camarota and Zeigler did of “raw data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) household survey, officially called the Current Population Survey (CPS)”.

Six days before they issued that report, I examined similar data as analyzed by “FRED” — the research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Unlike the Center, FRED has skin in this game, because the Federal Reserve relies on that BLS/CPS data when it, among other things, sets interest rates.

As I noted, FRED’s analysis of the BLS data:

reveals that the foreign-born population in the United States dropped, month-over-month, from 49.135 million in June to 48.510 million in July — a decline of 625,000 in 31 days — but, more saliently, fell by 1.937 million since March, when the FRED analysis showed there were 50.477 million foreign-born individuals in this country.

Digging into the footnotes of the FRED analysis reveals these figures only relate to the foreign-born aged 16 years and older, not to the entire foreign-born population. The Center’s analysis went further and used the actual public-use data from the CPS once it became available to look at the entire foreign-born population.

In addition, as noted, that FRED analysis examined changes in the foreign-born population between March and July, not the January-to-July analysis Camarota and Zeigler performed, but it still showed a decline of nearly two million in the foreign-born population in this country in just four months.

In any event, unlike the Center’s conclusions, FRED’s analysis directly and immediately impacts everyday Americans’ lives, deciding how much interest they will pay for a house or a car, and how much their Social Security or federal retirement benefits will rise in the coming year, to name just a few effects.

But if anybody is calling out FRED, I haven’t seen it.

“How a Historic Immigration Drop Is Changing the Job Market”

Which brings me to an August 24 economic outlook published in the Wall Street Journal, headlined “How a Historic Immigration Drop Is Changing the Job Market”. It begins:

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. labor market has entered “a curious kind of balance.” The demand for workers has cooled, yet the unemployment rate has held steady because the supply of labor has slowed abruptly.

Behind that slowing in the labor supply is a dramatic swing in immigration, from one of the biggest waves in U.S. history to almost none. Economists say that could have subtle but lasting consequences.

So far, so good, but read down 10 paragraphs, and here’s what the Journal has to say:

There have been claims that net immigration has already turned negative, such as a report by the Pew Research Center [PRC] this past week. In an Aug. 14 press release, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants had left the U.S. in her first 200 days on the job. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email that figure “comes from our own numbers,” without providing detail.

However, Noem’s press release included a chart copied and pasted from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for less immigration that recently estimated 1.6 million unauthorized migrants have left since January.

A couple of things stand out from that excerpt.

The Pew Research Center Report

The topline of that PRC report was a finding that the immigrant population peaked in January, when 53.3 million people here were foreign-born (15.8 percent of the total), and fell in June when there were 51.9 million “immigrants” in the United States (15.4 percent of the U.S. population).

I should highlight that the Center issued its own detailed report on that January 2025 peak in March and analyzed the decline between January and May in June, prior to issuing its latest assessment on August 12.

Note that PRC doesn’t use the term “immigrant” in a legal sense, defined at section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as “every alien except an alien who is within one of” a series of defined “classes of nonimmigrant aliens”.

Instead, it includes immigrants who have naturalized, i.e., “U.S. citizens”, who PRC estimates constituted 46 percent of the “immigrant” population in 2023.

By contrast, PRC in that report described 27 percent of the “immigrant” population (14 million individuals) in 2023 as “unauthorized immigrants”, that is aliens who are here illegally, including illegal entrants and nonimmigrant visa overstays. PRC didn’t include an estimate of the unauthorized population in 2025, however, contending “recent figures by legal status are not yet available”.

I’ll leave to it Camarota and Ziegler to explain whether such figures are available, but in any event, I note their August 12 report (1) included any number of caveats; and (2) cited to their sources.

In fact, Camarota responded to contentions that some immigrants weren’t responding to the CPS on August 20, finding there was no evidence that was the case.

He also admitted: “Capturing the foreign-born population is always challenging. In a future publication, we will explore in much more detail whether the quality of the foreign-born data in the CPS has deteriorated.”

DHS “Copied and Pasted” a Chart from CIS

As for the Journal’s statement that the DHS secretary’s “press release” included “a chart copied and pasted from the Center for Immigration Studies”, that fact is dispositively true — you can look at the release and see that the Center is clearly identified.

But that doesn’t mean McLaughlin’s statement that DHS’s figures come from DHS’s own analysis isn’t accurate. I’d fully expect the department to track such data and verify analyses from outside sources before promoting them.

DHS plainly has the bandwidth to do so. The department boasts a whole component — the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), part of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) — whose sole raison d’être is to “publish timely and authoritative homeland security statistics”.

While there are no appropriations figures for OHSS per se, Congress gave I&A (“a unique member of the U.S. Intelligence Community”) more than $345 million in the FY 2025 funding cycle to pay 1,019 full-time employees. At least some of that scratch ended up at OHSS, meaning the office has plenty of resources to fact-check Camarota and Zeigler.

It’s also true — as the Journal asserts — that the Center “advocates for less immigration”, but then so did more than half of the U.S. voter respondents (55 percent) in a July 2024 Gallup poll, a sentiment that did much to secure Donald Trump’s second election victory.

Purely objectively, however, the Journal’s description makes it more likely — not less — that Camarota and Zeigler’s estimates are fair and accurate.

One thing you’ll notice about arguments over immigration is that many on both sides will try to inflate the “illegal alien” total to prove their points. The Center doesn’t do that, and if we did, media outlets and decisionmakers wouldn’t seek out our analysis because it would be tendentious — not enlightening.

“Demographic Outlook” Analyses from CBO

One source rarely challenged is the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a part of the legislative branch that, as its website explains, was established in 1975 “to provide objective, nonpartisan information to support the Congressional budget process and to help the Congress make effective budget and economic policy”.

To that end, each year in January CBO publishes “The Demographic Outlook”, a projection of expected changes in the U.S. population over the next three decades.

As an aside, CBO so trusted both Camarota and me to be objective sources of information that it asked each of us to comment on its January 2024 report, “The Demographic Outlook: 2024 to 2054”, and thanked us in the acknowledgements.

Back to the point, CBO estimated in that report that “about 440,000 people” in what it describes as the “other foreign national category” — or what PRC calls “unauthorized immigrants” and Secretary Noem referred to as “illegal aliens”— “emigrated in FY 2023”.

Similarly, in its January 2025 report, “The Demographic Outlook: 2025 to 2055”, CBO estimated that “about 600,000 people” in that “other foreign national category” emigrated in 2024.

Combined, that is 1.44 million “other foreign nationals”, “unauthorized immigrants”, or “illegal aliens” who, CBO estimated, left in that two-year period, with the rate of emigration increasing by 36 percent in the second year.

And not just any “two-year period”: a two-year period in which the Biden administration went out of its way not to remove any but the most egregious criminal aliens here unlawfully, to such a degree that it fought state efforts to force DHS to deport more aliens here unlawfully all the way to the Supreme Court twice, winning there in 2022 and 2023.

It’s beyond cavil that Trump’s deportation policies are the mirror opposite of Biden’s, and that Noem is actively promoting self-deportation, so if no one questioned CBO’s estimates of 1.44 million illegal aliens who emigrated between FY 2023 and FY 2024, why are outlets like the Journal so querulous about the Center’s estimate that 1.6 million illegal aliens left in the first seven months of Trump II?

Back to the Journal

Note the Journal ultimately conceded that:

While the decline in net immigration can’t be measured precisely, it is nonetheless being felt. Between May and July, the economy added just 106,000 nonfarm payrolls, or 35,000 a month, the lowest three-month stretch since the Covid-19 pandemic. The fact the unemployment rate didn’t rise at the same time suggests fewer people were entering the labor force in search of jobs, evidence of the immigration crackdown.

Which calls into question whether the authors of the Journal piece ever bothered to read the analysis by Camarota and Zeigler, because they concluded that:

Based on the CPS, the BLS reports in Table A-7 of the Employment Situation Report that the number of employed foreign-born individuals declined by 1 million from January to July 2025. Table A-7 also shows an increase of 2.5 million workers among the U.S.-born.

Similarly, FRED estimated, based on the BLS/CPS data, that the “foreign-born” portion of the U.S. “civilian labor force” (again, aged 16 and above) dropped by some 1.653 million between March and July, while the “native-born” component (same) rose by 2.645 million over that same period.

* * *

Here are three conclusions from my 33 years of immigration experience: (1) not every alien who comes here remains forever, and many voluntarily leave; (2) most aliens come illegally to work and only stop working when they either can’t work or leave; and (3) enforcement works. If the Congressional Budget Office trusts me, you can, too.