One million undocumented migrants made U.S. their home in Biden's first year

A new study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an immigration reform group, reveals that the number of undocumented migrants living in the United States increased by approximately one million in the first year since President Joe Biden took office – costing the public an additional $9.4 billion per year.

An early copy of the study was first obtained by Fox News Network.

FAIR’s analysis shows that there are presently about 15.5 million undocumented migrants living in the United States – up from 14.5 million in 2020. Although estimates have placed that number at around 11 million in recent years, many pundits have warned that the number has grown as the crisis along the border continues to worsen. The group also released a fiscal cost study that found that undocumented migrants now cost taxpayers at least $143.1 billion – an increase of $9.4 billion since 2020.

According to the group, the increase in population can be attributed in part to the improvement of the U.S. economy as it continues to re-open after the pandemic.

"Businesses are once again hiring, and many unscrupulous employers are using this as an opportunity to turn to reliably cheap labor to undercut the market and make up for lost profits resulting from economic shutdowns stemming from the pandemic," the report says. "These unethical hiring practices occur even though millions of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed."

Another factor is the lax approach to border security demonstrated by the Biden administration, which recently tried to repeal a number of Trump-era policies and has instructed officers to narrow the scope of their enforcement. According to FAIR, the president “has effectively abolished the mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), preventing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from securing our southern border, and implementing measures that encourage mass illegal immigration." 

FAIR President Dan Stein released a statement accompanying the report and said that “President Biden and the people he appointed to key positions in his administration have pursued the most radical open-borders policies in the history of any sovereign nation, and these new numbers bear that out.”

"If not for the COVID pandemic, which forced the administration to keep Title 42 in place last year, the additional influx and costs to American taxpayers would have been far greater,” he added.

The report further shows that the states with the largest population of undocumented migrants are California, Texas, Florida and New York – while the states with the fewest are North Dakota and West Virginia.

The report was released just as numbers at the border once again begin to surge, with more than 221,000 migrant encounters reported in March and increases expected moving forward as Title 42 faces the risk of being shuttered.