by Paleo Pundit
The Center for Immigration Studies recently published an analysis arguing that the foreign-born population has declined by 2.9 million since January 2025. CIS went further, claiming that the illegal-immigrant population has fallen by roughly 2.3 million over that period.
I wrote a short article explaining why I think we should be cautious about those numbers. Here is another piece of evidence worth considering.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains FRED, a treasure trove of economic data. Its series on foreign-born employment comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, which is collected by the Census Bureau.
In December 2024, an estimated 30.729 million foreign-born were employed in the United States.
In August 2026, the figure was 30.780 million.
In other words, despite the claim that the foreign-born population has fallen by nearly 3 million, the government’s published estimate of foreign-born employment is essentially unchanged from late 2024.
Of course, that alone doesn’t by itself prove that the foreign-born population hasn’t declined. Employment and population are different measures, and the CPS is subject to sampling error. But it is an important piece of countervailing evidence, because CIS itself estimates that about 44 percent of its claimed decline in the foreign-born population consists of workers.
An even larger methodological problem, as I wrote before, is CPS’ undergoing an unusually large population-control adjustment in January 2025. The Bureau of Labor statistics (BLS) says the adjustment added 2.9 million people to the estimated civilian non-institutional population, including about 2 million employed people. The adjustment largely reflected revised estimates of the enormous increase in international migration during the preceding years. BLS explicitly warned that January 2025 estimates were therefore not directly comparable with December 2024.
Then another population-control adjustment occurred in January 2026. That revision incorporated newer information showing a decline in net international migration and, because of demographic revisions, reduced estimated employment by roughly 1.4 million. Once again, BLS warned against straightforward comparisons across the break.
This matters because the apparent decline CIS is interpreting as evidence that millions of immigrants have actually left the country is being measured by a survey whose population weights were substantially revised during precisely the period under examination.
A second important methodological limitation is that CPS does not ask immigrants whether they are legally or illegally present. The Census Bureau explicitly says that legal status cannot be separately tabulated from the survey. CIS’ estimate that the illegal population declined by 2.3 million is therefore not a direct government count. It is an estimate derived from a survey estimate — an estimate of an estimate.
None of this means that immigration hasn’t declined. Border Patrol encounters clearly have declined, removals have occurred, and there is good reason to believe that net international migration has fallen substantially from roughly 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, with a further substantial decline projected for 2026. This is all good news. But that does not establish that the decline in the CPS foreign-born population represents an equivalent number of immigrants physically leaving the country. The Census Bureau itself cautions that changes in the CPS foreign-born estimate might reflect not only emigration but also “survey non-response, coverage error or the impact of population controls.”
When one government series shows roughly 30.7 million foreign-born workers both before and after this supposed historic population decline — while BLS simultaneously warns us that major changes in CPS population controls complicate comparisons across the period — considerable caution is warranted before treating the CIS estimate as an established fact.
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