Negative Net Migration: A Necessary Course Correction

The United States experienced negative net migration in 2025. Estimates from Brookings and the Center for Immigration Studies vary, but there is broad agreement that more migrants left the United States last year than arrived. The Census Bureau estimates that net migration (legal and illegal) dropped by half between the summer of 2024 and the summer of 2025.

This is unlikely to last, but the slow down of net migration after the Biden-era surge acts as a temporary release valve on the pressure that built up on receiving communities and the American landscape.

How we got there:

• Cancelled Biden-era parole programs
• Lower border crossings
• Fewer refugees
• More deportations
• More self-deportations

In 2025, the Trump Administration virtually stopped illegal border crossings and began to reverse the border crisis.

Brookings and the Center for Immigration Studies have very different estimates of the number of illegal aliens who left the U.S. on their own last year, but both agree it was at least in the hundreds of thousands. It could be more than a million, which would be enough to offset the number of green cards the U.S. issues each year, which remain at or near record levels.

A Significant but Limited Offset

Immigration (legal and illegal) added a net 8 million people during the Biden Administration. That was the largest immigration wave in American history; most of it was illegal. Those numbers intensified the housing crisis, worsened the biodiversity crisis, strained our infrastructure, drained taxpayer coffers, and flooded the labor pool as the number of Americans disconnected from economic opportunities grew.

The negative net migration of 2025 barely begins to offset the Biden numbers.

A Temporary Change

With millions of inadmissible aliens remaining in the U.S. from the border crisis alone, it is conceivable that we’ll continue to see negative net migration for the next few years. That could change if interior enforcement or self-deportations decline.

It would also change once the illegal population falls below a level where out-migration can no longer offset the one million green cards issued every year.

And it would certainly change if a future administration reverses course and reinstates Biden-era policies.

What we’re seeing is a necessary course correction; a surge of out-migration after a historic surge of in-migration (much of it illegal).

The only way we achieve a stable immigration policy that we can sustain is for Congress to pass lasting legislative change into law that lowers legal immigration and secures the borders permanently.