On immigration, the U.S. faces a mountain compared to Europe’s molehill

Opponents of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies often call his detain-and-deport strategy extreme and cruel. The American Civil Liberties Union recently accused the president of seeking to “terrorize entire communities.”

The Democratic Party has focused its immigration policy on accepting more migrants, providing them more support, and handling deportations more humanely. But it has often left unrecognized the fact that the United States takes in more immigrants—legal and illegal—than any other country in the world.

That’s just one of the overlooked facts that I uncovered when I compared U.S. immigration policy to that of Europe, which has had its own migration crisis in the past decade.

Migrants prefer the United States, even when it is farther away

While Latin American immigrants make up the largest group of people crossing into the United States, countries much closer to Europe are also seeing large numbers of their citizens flee to the United States.

Since 2010, the number of illegal immigrants leaving Africa to come to the United States has grown significantly, the Migration Policy Institute reported. In 2010, only about 149,000 immigrants from Africa were living in the United States. By 2023, that number had roughly tripled to 415,000.

Many African individuals who arrived in the United States from Africa did so after traveling through as many as nine countries, the institute reported.

Migrants have more economic opportunity in the United States

“Low-skilled immigrants just excel in the United States in a way that they do not in Europe,” said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “They’re less dependent on social services here.”

He acknowledged that many Americans disapproved of New York City’s choice to house illegal immigrants in lavish hotels but argued few immigrants under the Biden administration experienced that treatment. “I think the New York City example has kind of biased people in that way, because it’s highly prominent,” he said. “Most cities and states didn’t have that type of policy.”

Instead, many illegal immigrants in the United States can get work permits 180 days after applying for asylum, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And they are largely left to fend for themselves while authorities review their asylum applications—a process that can take years.

Meanwhile, in Europe, illegal immigrants can’t obtain work as easily. Asylum applicants face significant obstacles to getting plugged into the workforce due to administrative and regulatory hurdles in many EU countries, according to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.

“The United States is a much wealthier country, and there are a lot more job opportunities for low-skilled immigrants here,” said Bier. “And so their integration is a lot easier, and it’s a main reason why it’s such a draw for low-skilled immigrants to come here.”

Word of mouth plays a large role in migration

Immigrants aren’t just following the money when they come to the United States from afar—often, they’re also following family.

“People don’t … wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to America,’” explained Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies. “What happens instead is they have a cousin who says, ‘Look, I can get you a job at the warehouse.’ They have another relative who says, ‘Look, I can explain how social services work and what you need to do to get a job. I know a guy who knows a guy who can hook you up with a job.’”

In some cases, they’re following branding. “The United States is perceived as, still, the land of opportunity. So the massive wage differentials between some countries also matters,” he explained.

Border crossings are falling in the United States and Europe

How a country treats people who show up at its borders asking to come in says a lot about whether that country will see more people showing up, said 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 robbed, killed, or raped. You’re not likely to do it unless you’re pretty darn sure that, when you get to the border, they’re going to let you in,” he said. “If we don’t release people at the border, people won’t come.”

Shortly after Trump took office, the U.S. government reported that border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border had plummeted.

Many European countries over the past several years have taken steps to prevent illegal immigrants from entering their countries, the Center for Migration Studies reported last year. And as a result, they’ve seen fewer illegal immigrants actually coming in. The research group Statista reported that roughly 240,000 illegal immigrants entered the EU in 2024—a more than 30% drop compared to the year before, and its lowest number of border crossings since 2021.

The U.S. population of illegal immigrants dwarfs Europe’s

Closing borders doesn’t remove individuals who are already living inside those borders. And when it comes to the number of individuals who are already illegally living inside their borders, the United States and Europe are a mountain and a molehill, respectively. But both are struggling to remove those illegal immigrants—albeit with different strategies.

The United States in 2023 harbored about 12 million illegal immigrants in a population of roughly 340 million people, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Meanwhile, the European Union reported a population of about 1.26 million illegal immigrants among a population of roughly 450 million during the same year.

In 2024, the EU reported that its illegal immigrant population had dropped roughly 27% to 918,000. Earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the United States’ illegal immigration population dropped by 1.6 million in the first 200 days of Trump’s presidency.

Europe emphasizes self-deportation

EU member countries have instructed roughly half of the 918,000 illegal immigrants living within their borders to leave, the coalition said. But only about 1 out of every 4 of those individuals ordered to leave were forced out.

Bier explained that Europe can’t forcibly remove as many illegal immigrants as the United States can. Part of that is due to uncooperative countries of origin or a lack of third-party countries willing to take them in, according to the Migration Policy Institute. While the United States can—and does—arrest and deport many illegal immigrants, Europe often has to choke off its illegal immigrant population from social services to force them to leave, he said. That’s a strategy that the Trump administration is also trying to implement, but it won’t work quite as well in the United States.

“In the United States, being cut off to social services is kind of baked in, but the economic upside and the ability to get a job here is much greater,” Bier said. “So there’s a bigger incentive there that overwhelms the loss in social services.”

The United States harbors many illegal immigrants who have already been ordered to leave but have stayed inside the country. Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says roughly 1.4 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States have standing orders of removal.

“So they’ve had all the due process that they’re entitled to—often multiple appeals—and they’ve been ordered deported,” Hankinson said.

Catch-and-release is part of the problem

Some immigrants remain in the United States because of catch-and-release policies that previous administrations implemented, Hankinson said. Instead of holding illegal immigrants in detention facilities while they waited for a hearing to determine whether they were eligible to be in the country, recent administrations opted to release them with instructions to reappear at an appointed time for their hearings.

“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,” Hankinson said. “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 … like 20% for unaccompanied adults and like 2% for families.”

Such catch-and-release policies violate federal law, Hankinson said. “What the law says is that aliens who are in the United States illegally shall be detained, right? It doesn’t say they could be, they might be, they may be, but says they shall be detained until the conclusion of their immigration hearings,” he explained.

If officials don’t detain illegal immigrants through the conclusion of their hearings, the immigrants sometimes don’t even show up for the hearings. After being caught at the border and released into the United States, they ignore orders to appear in court. As such, immigration judges have ordered them deported while they weren’t even at their hearing. Such in absentia rulings are not uncommon, Hankinson explained.

But even as the United States tries to remove illegal immigrants, David Bier explained that most Americans are not unsympathetic to individuals seeking a better life.

“I do think that Americans in the public are more understanding and sympathetic toward a low-skilled immigrant who’s working here than they are in Europe,” he said.

But Camarota argued that Americans should be wary of viewing illegal immigrants as only desperate people trying to survive.

“I think progressives and liberals on immigration—and you can see this is both a strength and a weakness—is that they tend to see, say, the people who show up at the border as simply or entirely as desperate people fleeing desperate circumstances,” Camarota said. “Now that’s not a ridiculous point, because it can often be true, but what they often fail to understand is that they’re also often rational risk takers who respond to the incentives we create.”