The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has reviewed the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey’s latest release of raw data and has come to the encouraging conclusion that the foreign-born born population of the United States declined by 2.2 million between January and July of 2025. This is a decline from the historic peaks of 53.3 million foreigners comprising 16% of the American population on January 1st of 2025. The CIS also estimates that the illegal immigration population has declined by 1.6 million, which also means the legal immigrant population has declined by 600,000 individuals. [Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, CIS.org, August 12, 2025]

The CIS estimates that the illegal alien population has declined by 10% from the Center’s estimate of 15.8 million illegals at the start of this year and now sits at 14.2 million (still far too high for any American nationalist to tolerate) and the Center believes that additional out-migration will continue to increase as a result of government immigration enforcement actions.

Not only does this decline mean that fewer illegal aliens are roaming America’s streets but also that the number of foreign-born individuals in employment in the United States has decreased. The CIS projects that 1 million foreign-born employees have left the American job market while 2.5 million American-born workers have entered the job market. A fantastic turn of events for American families!

CIS does have caveats in their report, of course. They state honestly that they require more data to shore up estimates on the employment situation and how many legal immigrants may or may not be leaving the country, but they do present more than enough data to show a clear trend of decreasing foreign-born persons in this country. Furthermore of the 2.2 million people that are projected to have left the United States, two million of them have been from Latin America. CIS projects the non-citizen Hispanic population that has arrived since 1980 (both legal and illegal) has declined from 17.378 million to 15.378 million over the course of the 6th month period from January to July of this year.

These trends are fantastic and it should reinforce the belief of any American nationalist that large scale deportations and, more important, even larger scale voluntary remigration are feasible policies. If hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants can be enticed to leave through even the most basic immigration enforcement actions of the Trump administration and more than 1.6 million illegals can be deported and encouraged to depart in a mere 6 months then broader remigration policy is an absolutely reachable objective.
It is likely that the administration will continue with escalating immigration enforcement actions against illegal aliens and continue policies such as the $1,000 dollar payments and free flights to encourage other illegals to depart of their own free will. These policies are clearly working. Still, the Trump administration needs to finally move to change the “public charge” rules that are meant to keep welfare-dependent immigrants out of this country and prevent them from becoming our fellow citizens.
CIS data shows an unsurprising but still greatly distressing 54% of legal immigrants are dependent on some form of major American welfare program yet current government rules do not classify these individuals as “public charges”. To put this number into perspective it means that more than 7 million legal immigrants (green card holders) and 12.55 million naturalized citizens are living in households utilizing SNAP (food stamps), housing assistance such as section 8, Medicaid, and other welfare programs most Americans would be astonished to learn are open to so many legal immigrants.
Of the legal immigrants admitted to this country barely 17% in fiscal year 2023 were admitted for reasons of employment. Some years this percentage has been as low as 14% and rarely does it rise above 20%. Most of our “hard working” legal immigrants are hardly working at all and are admitted as the relatives of other immigrants and naturalized “American” citizens. This trend must be reversed.
Finally, the administration needs to begin a serious national conversation about voluntary paid repatriation/remigration of the 45% of minority individuals in the United States who have stated they would leave the country if they had the resources to do so. The administration can stray away from the contentious issues of race or ethnicity by framing this as a simple move to make sure that those people who live in America love this country and wish to see it thrive. To finally bring a policy voice to the oft repeated words “if you don’t like it here why don’t you just leave?”
We should be giving them the resources to “just leave” and building a more cohesive country in the process