Deportation Rates in Historical Perspective

Alex NowrastehIn last week ’s Democratic primary debate, Univision anchor Jorge Ramosasked Joe Biden about President Obama ’s record on immigration enforcement. Ramos said, “you served as vice president in an administration that deported 3 million people, the most ever in U.S. history.”Democratic partisans were very upset on twitter, but the numbers don ’t lie. President Obama removed more people from the United States,no matter how you dice the numbers than any other president. But was President Obama's removal record an anomaly? To answer that question, I looked at the number of removals per president going back to 1892 when the government first startedrecording them. Table 1 shows the presidents, the number of removals under each administration, and the number of removals per year. The latter number is important as it controls for the number of years in office.From 1892-2018, Democratic presidents were in power for 60 years and removed about 4.6 million people for an average of 76,635 per year. During the same time, Republican Presidents were in power for 67 years and removed about 3.7 million people for an annual average of 54,670. Presidents usually inherit the immigration enforcement policies of their predecessors for at least a year. I adjusted for that by assigning the number of removals in the first year of any administration to the previous administration and the results were almost identical.But the political parties changed quite a bit over the 1892-2018...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs