(Headline USA) The illegal immigrant population in the U.S. grew by more than 1 million people during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, according to a new analysis.
A study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that the number of illegal immigrants who are still living in the country jumped from 14.5 million in 2020 to 15.5 million in 2021. This increase cost taxpayers at least $143.1 billion, the group claimed.
Two factors contributed to this rise in illegal immigration, FAIR said: the pandemic and Biden’s lax immigration policies.
“Businesses are once again hiring, and many unscrupulous employers are using this as an opportunity to turn to reliably cheap labor to undercut the market and make up for lost profits resulting from economic shutdowns stemming from the pandemic,” the study said. “These unethical hiring practices occur even though millions of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed.”
Moreover, Biden “has effectively abolished the mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), preventing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from securing our southern border, and implementing measures that encourage mass illegal immigration,” the group said.
However, FAIR admitted that the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. could be much higher, since the Department of Homeland Security “only (loosely) counts foreign nationals who enter and leave the United States in a lawful manner” and does not know the exact number of “how many people cross the border unlawfully and evade immigration authorities.”
Another immigration watchdog, the Centers for Immigration Studies, estimates that as many as 46.2 illegal immigrants are currently living in the U.S.
“President Biden and the people he appointed to key positions in his administration have pursued the most radical open-borders policies in the history of any sovereign nation, and these new numbers bear that out,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement.
“If not for the COVID pandemic, which forced the administration to keep Title 42 in place last year, the additional influx and costs to American taxpayers would have been far greater.”
