Why they come

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 21st of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up: Illegal immigration numbers.

For years, Democrats have argued the US should open its doors wider to immigrants.

Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking here in 2023:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Economically, we need these populations.

She says the US doesn’t have enough workers, especially as baby boomers retire:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: And let me tell you, as boomers begin to age, and as they enter retirement, the amount of strain on labor is going to require from, for example, home health care and our care systems overall, we do not have the people to sustain that.

REICHARD: But what AOC and other Democrats fail to mention is that the United States already takes in more immigrants than the rest of the world.

WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more on why that’s so. 

JOSH SCHUMACHER: When it comes to the numbers, it’s easy to see just how different illegal immigration is in the US compared to Europe.

In 2023, 450 million people lived in the European Union. It had an estimated illegal immigrant population of 1.26 million.

That same year the United States’ had a population of about 340 million people—so, about 110 million less people—but its illegal immigrant population was 10 times higher than Europe, roughly 12 million people.

Why does the United States have more illegal immigrants? Well, to begin with, they usually have an easier time succeeding here.

David Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.

BIER: Low-skilled immigrants in the United States, are much more successful than low-skilled immigrants to Europe are. If you look at their unemployment rates, their their ability to integrate into society across other metrics. Low-skilled immigrants just excel in the United States in a way that they do not in Europe.

That’s because the United States has different labor laws than most European countries do.

BIER: It's actually much more difficult in Europe to work illegally than it is in the United States for a number of different reasons. One, just for, for broad labor market reasons, the United States has a lower minimum wage, more flexible labor policies. You can fire people at will. So there it's just easier to hire lower skilled workers here in the United States.

Now a common concern about illegal immigration in the United States is the economic drain on government resources. Those include forcing the state to cover the cost of uninsured medical expenses, pouring more resources into increasingly crowded classrooms, and other pressures on local infrastructure.

Yet it turns out that illegal immigrants in the United States aren’t nearly as dependent on government welfare as many in Europe are. That’s one of the main reasons for the rise in immigration crackdowns there.

According to David Bier, the motivation for reforming the system in the US is much less financial. He says Americans care more about the fact that undocumented immigrants are here illegally than they do about the amount of resources they consume.

BIER: People in the United States just don't like to see people entering the country illegally violating the law…

That’s not to say that Europeans don’t want to uphold the rule of law, but their laws make it more difficult to arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants. So many countries in the EU have focused instead on making it less beneficial for them to stay.

David Bier explains:

BIER: It's the restriction on access to the labor market. It's efforts to incentivize them to leave through financial incentives, cutting them off from social services. So those are some of the mechanisms that are more common in Europe.

The Trump administration is also trying to motivate illegal immigrants to self-deport while trying to promote proper immigration.

BIER: I think Trump fits, I don't like to see illegality, I don't like to see chaos, but I'm not actually against having people come here to work and be an immigrant who's here legally, and, you know, contributing to the country. He's less upset about that.

Compared to the EU, the US annually deports about twice as many illegal immigrants in total, but by percentage, the EU is deporting much more of its illegal immigrant population per year.

Probably the biggest difference between the US and EU on the topic of illegal immigration is access. Even though the journey may be equally difficult, once here, immigrants can usually get into the country much more easily, leading many to risk the trip.

Steven Camarota is the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

CAMAROTA: It's very dangerous to march through Central America and cross the Darien Gap and then into Mexico and you have a chance of being, you know, robbed, killed or raped, you're not likely to do it unless you're pretty sure that when you get to the border they're going to let you in.

Those more open-border policies in the U.S. have existed alongside much more closed-border policies in Europe. And that means many immigrants who would have an easier time getting to Europe have instead come to the United States.

But Camarota says one of the most common reasons people enter the US improperly is even more practical. They’re following friends or family.

CAMAROTA: People don't want to wake up one day and say, I'm going to America. What happens instead is that they had a brother in America said, You know what things are, pretty good here, I'll do it. You can stay with me. When you come they have a cousin who says, look, I can get you a job at the warehouse.

The fact that the United States has so many illegal immigrants begs the question: Why haven’t they been deported before now? There are a couple of reasons. First, there’s an incredible backlog.

HANKINSON: In the United States we have now, there are about 1.4 million people who have final orders of removal.

Simon Hankinson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

HANKINSON: So they've had all the due process that they're entitled to, often multiple appeals, and they've been ordered deported.

He says another reason is years of catch-and-release policies have meant the problem has been getting worse, not better.

HANKINSON: If an alien was detained through the duration of their hearing then there was like a 99% chance that they were going to be removed. Because they're detained, right you got them right there. You put them on a plane, you send them home. But if the alien is released, the percentage of those removed just plummets down to, it's like 20% for unaccompanied adults and like 2% for families.

But the Trump administration is trying its best to turn that ship around as fast as it can. It’s made massive efforts to remove illegal immigrants eligible for deportation, going after many of those 1.4 million who have as-yet-unenforced orders for removal.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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