The US has seen its largest surge in immigration in its history under the Biden Administration — surpassing the Ellis Island-era migration boom that changed the face of the nation forever, according to a shocking new analysis.
An average of 2.4 million immigrants per year poured into the US between 2021 and 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office. About 60% of the migrants crossed into the US illegally, a Goldman Sachs analysis found.
The total net migration during the Biden administration is expected to reach more than 8 million — exceeding even the pace of new arrivals to the US during the 1850s when the portion of foreign-born residents exploded, according to a New York Times analysis.
“For the past four years, we’ve been hearing from the administration, it’s not a problem… And the American public knows when they’re being lied to,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) advocacy group.
“And that was one of the things that probably influenced the election.”
Experts blamed President Biden’s messaging as he took office in 2021 that America would welcome asylum seekers, combined with his permissive catch-and-release policies at the border and generous immigration courts, for the massive surge.
“What Biden created day one was chaos,” Lora Ries, the Director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told The Post.
“He definitely opened the borders. He sent the signal loud and clear and the world responded coming illegally,” she added.
The surge in immigrants added 0.6% to the population per year during the period — similar to the migration that happened during the Ellis Island era of the 1850s.
America’s foreign born population now makes up a record 15.2% of the US, surpassing the previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890 — just two years before Ellis Island opened to deal with the influx of immigrants, according to the CBO and US Census Bureau.
The exact size of the surge, however, is likely even larger than government data shows because it relies on the once-in-a-decade US Census, which tends to get fewer replies from migrants worried about their legal status.
Mehlman, with FAIR, said the damage of such massive unchecked illegal migration is costing taxpayers more than $150 billion each year.
The CBO estimates that wage growth for Americans who did not attend college will be lower than it would have been in the coming years because of the recent surge.
The bulk of the surge in immigration can be attributed to the Biden administration’s easing of the strict policies put in place by President-elect Donald Trump, along with surging asylum approval rates that peaked at 52.6% in September 2023.
The US began experiencing a massive surge in immigration starting in 2021 following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers reporting nearly 2 million encounters that year.
Encounters spiked to more than 2.3 million in 2021, and 3.3 million in 2022 and 2.3 million in 2023, according to the CBP data.
The 2022 number was especially large due to the expiration of President-elect Donald Trump’s Title 42 policy, with migrants rushing to the border to try and enter before an expected crackdown on immigration and asylum grants.
Turmoil in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela also contributed to the increase in America’s immigrant population as thousands fled their homeland in favor of Biden’s promise to welcome those fleeing danger and oppression.
Jessica Vaughan, who serves as the director of policy studies at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said the surge in migration has hurt almost every aspect of American life for citizens and legal residents.
“I think there has been a lot of attention on the public safety and national security risks of this,” she told The Post.
“But the problem of the distortion of our labor markets and the impact on Americans and to a lesser extent, legal immigrants in these communities that have had to absorb all these migrants, that story has not been told,” she added.
“And I’m talking about the schools and the health care systems and the housing markets and the job markets are all under stress now because of this.”
History, however, could be repeated. Trump has vowed to crack down on immigration and introduce mass deportations for those who entered the US illegally.
A massive backlash against immigration occurred in the US following the boom in the late 1800s, with officials passing the Immigration Act of 1924 that tightly restricted migration to America.
The law, and other policies that excluded immigration from certain regions, led to a decades-long shrink in America’s foreign born population before it was repealed in 1965 in favor of a more inclusive policy under then-President Lyndon Johnson.