The New York Times finally tells the truth about illegal immigration

Now that the election is over

The New York Times has just published its findings on the surge of immigrants into the United States during the last four years. The Times says the findings are based on work by its reporters in conjunction with “government officials and outside experts” and is based on government data.

Here are the seven key findings:

1. The immigration surge since 2021 has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing even the levels of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

2. Even after adjusting for today’s larger population, the surge is slightly larger than that during the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. [Note: These Europeans came here legally.]

3. The share of the U.S. population born in another country has reached a record high as a result. That share hit 15.2 percent in the summer of 2023 and continued rising during the past 18 months. The previous high of 14.8 percent occurred in 1890.

4. President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy has been the main reason for the recent surge. During his 2020 campaign, Biden encouraged more people to come to the U.S., and he loosened several policies after taking office.

5. More than half of net migration since 2021 has been among people who entered the country illegally.

6. The unprecedented scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue played such a big role in the 2024 election.

7. The recent immigration surge has probably ended.

These findings aren’t exactly news. If there’s any news here, it’s that the New York Times finally is reporting them.

But even that’s not truly news. The election is over. The “border czar” has lost. There’s no cost to Democrats associated with the Times finally telling the truth about illegal immigration.

Until the election was over, the Times was never going to concede that “Biden’s welcoming immigration policy was the main reason for the immigration surge.” It certainly wasn’t going to write:

Biden administration officials sometimes argue that outside events, such as the turmoil in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela, have been the main cause of the surge, and those events did play a role. But the sharp decline of migration levels since this past summer — when Biden tightened the rules — indicates that the administration’s policies were the biggest factor.

The tightening of the rules, or a modicum of common sense. The vast majority of our recent immigrants don’t come from Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

Recall how Kamala Harris went about her job as border czar. Not by doing anything at the border, including even visiting it, but rather by going to Central America to address, supposedly, the “root causes” of illegal immigration.

But these causes are essentially constant. They existed before 2021 and they exist now, when the immigration surge has abated. Thus, the Times can’t even mention conditions in Central America as an alternative explanation — alternative to Biden’s policies — for the surge.

Finally, let’s focus on the last of the Times’ findings — that the immigration surge has probably ended. This looks like an attempt to prevent Donald Trump from getting credit for what is sure to be a steep decline in illegal immigration during the next four years compared to the last four.

The Times concedes that “the pace at which immigrants enter the U.S. . . .may continue to fall after Trump takes office.” But it views this as a natural phenomenon having little, if anything, to do with Trump: “Historically, in both the U.S. and other countries, very high levels of immigration often cause a political backlash that leads to new restrictions.”

But Trump doesn’t just intend to stop the flow of illegal entries into the U.S. He also intends significantly to increase the number of illegal entrants who will be forced to leave.

The Times doesn’t want to focus on this part of Trump’s program in an article about how we’ve just experienced the largest immigration surge in U.S. history and how the share of the foreign born population in the U.S. is at an all-time high.

Instead, the Times wants large-scale deportations to be a series of human interest stories in subsequent reports that are detached from their context — the hard facts and figures contained in today’s report.

That context may not matter to our mainstream media, but it’s likely to matter to the public that just elected Donald Trump due in significant part (as the Times acknowledges) to the unprecedented immigration surge for which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible.