In the wake of Vice Presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance’s viral interview with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, critical policy questions in the prospective Trump-Vance administration pertaining to immigration, wages, and housing are crystallizing. 

Vance’s interview showed the downward forces of immigration on labor force participation, housing affordability, and wages. But are there 25 million extra people in the country?

A glance at U.S. Census Bureau data clarifies the picture — with some caveats. 

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The share of the U.S. population that was foreign-born began increasing from its mid-century lows since the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The share of foreign-born has doubled since Ronald Reagan’s executive order giving legal status to children of those granted amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. 

As of 2022, 13.9% of the people living in the United States — more than 46 million people — were foreign born, per Census data. And by definition, the foreign-born stats do not include the children born to foreign nationals in the United States. 

In perspective, the overall U.S. population grew by about 50 million between 2000 and 2020. 

The census headcount became a flashpoint in 2020, after former President Donald Trump issued an executive order that illegal immigrants would not be counted in census data. After a legal battle over the count, President Joe Biden took office before the order could have taken effect. The count includes illegal immigrants, according to the Census Bureau’s website. 

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Fast forward to today, and the U.S. is on track for 10 million known border crossings during the Biden-Harris administration, plus 2 million “got-aways,” according to a House Homeland Security Committee report. 

So, the 2022 census data doesn’t include recent record years of border crossings, or the migrants brought to the United States under the Biden-Harris administration’s “Temporary Protected Status,” which waves the gavel of legality over another share of foreign nationals living in the United States. 

At least 1.2 million foreign nationals are either eligible for TPS or already have TPS status, according to the Pew Research Center. 

A 2018 Yale and MIT study concluded that estimates of 11 million illegal immigrants living in the country at that time undercounted the number by half, concluding that 22 million illegal immigrants were in the United States in 2018, and that even that figure could have been on the low side.

So, are there 25 million extra people in the United States due to immigration? 

The answer depends on the definition of extra and whether broad, foreign-born census stats, or the 10-plus million illegal border crossings, 2 million “got-aways”, and 1.2 million TPS-migrants, or the Yale-MIT estimate of 22 million as of 2018 are the baseline. 

In any event, apart from the security risks posed by the Biden-Harris administration’s border and immigration policy, the pressures on housing demand — and supply — as well as downward forces on wages, are scarcely a matter of debate.