Biden Oversaw Largest Immigration Surge In US History, Data Shows

President Joe Biden oversaw the highest level of net migration in United States history, underlining how severe the border crisis became during his tenure in the White House.

The migrant surge experienced in the past few years surpassed even the great immigration booms of the 1800s and early 1900s, according to The New York Times analysis of border data. Annual net migration, which is the sum of individuals who enter the U.S. subtracted by the number of people who leave, averaged about 2.4 million from 2021 to 2023 — resulting in net migration that is likely to surpass eight million people during the Biden administration.

Even when taking the country’s current population size into account, this pace of net migration — which includes both legal and illegal immigration — is still the fastest since at least 1850, according to The NYT. Much of the recent migration has been illegal, with around 60% of migrants entering the country since 2021 doing so without authorization.

The surge in illegal immigration followed Biden’s rapid unwinding of Trump-era policies that cracked down on unauthorized entries into the country.

During his first year in office, Biden undertook 296 executive actions on immigration, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. Of these executive actions, 89 specifically reversed or began the process of unwinding former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Biden went on to undo a number of major initiatives undertaken by his predecessor, such as ending border wall construction, shutting down the Remain in Mexico program, ending the COVID-era Title 42 health order that quickly expelled migrants, ending Safe Third Country agreements and other measures. The Democrat also tried to dramatically curtail interior immigration enforcement in the early days of his administration by issuing an executive order that placed a 100-day moratorium on most deportation — that order was ultimately struck down by the courts.

The Biden administration additionally oversaw a dramatic increase in the use of the CBP One app, which was expanded in January 2023 to include migrants waiting in Mexico hoping to schedule asylum appointments. More than 800,000 foreign nationals have scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry since the app’s expansion in January 2023, according to federal immigration data.

What soon followed these policy actions was an unprecedented level of illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border. There were roughly 8.5 million migrant encounters along the southern border from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, according to data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The share of the foreign-born population in the U.S. reached 15.2% in 2023, surpassing the previous high of 14.8% set in 1890, according to the NYT.

“You wouldn’t know it from the way President Biden, his ‘border czar,’ Vice President Harris, and their defenders in the media are talking about these numbers, but this was the second-worst year in terms of inadmissible alien encounters ever — only surpassed by the all-time record Biden and Harris set just last fiscal year,” House Homeland Committee Chairman Mark Green said in a prepared statement immediately following CBP’s release of fiscal year 2024 data.

Amid record-breaking illegal immigration and surveys indicating that American voters were growing increasingly hawkish on the issue, Biden issued an executive order in June that did successfully drive down unlawful encounters at the southern border. However, the fix appeared to come too late, as Trump went on to win in an electoral landslide off a hardline border platform, shifting several border counties into the GOP column for the first time in generations.