The total migrant population in the United States barely grew in 2025 amid President Donald Trump’s low-migration/high-productivity economic policy, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The survey “shows a total foreign-born (also called immigrant) [legalized and illegal] population of 50.4 million — up slightly from the 50.2 million in the 2024 [survey],” alongside 290 million U.S.-born Americans, says an October 30 report from the Center for Immigration Studies.
Without Trump’s policies, the migrant population would have jumped by 2.4 million in 2025, CIS reported.
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The overall migrant population saw “an increase of just 174,000 from mid-2024 to mid-2025, compared to growth of 2.4 million from 2023 to 2024,” says the report. Interim data from 2026 shows a further drop in the number of resident migrants of about 790,000 from March 2025 to March 2026.
The 2025 and 2026 declines are a huge reversal from the federal government’s pro-migration policies since 1965 and 1990 — and from President Joe Biden’s recent welcome of at least 8 million migrants.
For decades, the federal government has boosted the nation’s economy by importing consumers, workers, and renters from poor countries. The huge annual inflow has included many illegal migrants, roughly 1 million temporary workers, and roughly 1 million legalized immigrants — on top of 3.6 million U.S. births each year.
President Donald J. Trump boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Monday, October 5, 2026, en route Joint Base Andrews for a trip to Nebraska. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
This economic policy of mass migration — and the resulting bubble of cheap labor — has been a huge boon for many employers and investors in many sectors, such as real estate, restaurant, hotel, and entertainment sectors. The inflow has also been a huge gain for the Democratic Party’s urban political machines.
In the last two decades, the inflow has included many foreign graduates, helping to boost profits in the white-collar banking, insurance, and technology sectors.
But this policy of Extraction Migration has imposed huge costs on Americans and their children.
Those costs include reduced wages, less workplace investment, and costlier housing. Additional costs include more intrusive government, extra government debt, skewed schools, crowded hospitals, criminal damage, chaotic civic diversity, and citizens’ loss of political power in their own country.
WATCH — CBP’s Rodney Scott: Border Enforcement Is “Night and Day” Under Trump vs. Biden:
But since Trump’s 2024 win, his deputies have curbed the airport inflow of legalized migrants and blocked the border inflow of illegal migrants. That cutoff of extra labor has pressured employers to invest in productivity-boosting technology and to increase wages for Americans.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News in August, adding:
We don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
The reduced U.S. reliance on migration also helps poor countries expand their skilled workforces and attract wealth-expanding investment.
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