More leaving than arriving

When did more people last move out of the United States than move in? Not in at least half a century. Economists at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute estimate that it happened again in 2025.

Net migration works like a bathtub. Arrivals pour in from the faucet; departures go down the drain. What matters is whether the water level is rising or falling. For fifty years it rose, and recently it rose fast: the Census Bureau counted net international migration of 2.7 million in the year ending June 2024, the highest in its series.

Then it turned. In the following year, which included the first five months of President Trump's second term, net migration fell to 1.3 million. Census projects about 321,000 for the year ending this past July, and said in January that the trend was heading toward negative for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Brookings and AEI team put 2025 between 10,000 and 295,000 below zero. For 2026, their range runs from 925,000 below zero to 185,000 above it, and they expect another negative year.

The faucet, more than the drain

Most people picture deportation flights when they hear these numbers, but the biggest change came at the faucet. The economists estimate that between 22,000 and 39,000 people entered the country without inspection in 2025. In 2024, the Congressional Budget Office put that number at 270,000. Departures rose too, but a tub mostly stops filling when someone turns off the tap.

The strongest objection comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates net immigration stayed positive in 2025, at about 410,000. The Brookings team also warns that fewer newcomers means slower growth in the labor force, consumer spending and GDP. Both points deserve a hearing. Estimates of people crossing borders are hard, and a smaller workforce does slow the economy's top-line numbers.

Look at what every estimate shares, though: a drop from millions a year to a few hundred thousand or less. The Census Bureau's own monthly survey, as analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies, shows the foreign-born population down 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026. And the jobs did not disappear: by CIS's reading of federal data, the economy added 590,000 jobs over that stretch, even as the number of immigrant workers fell by nearly 1.3 million.

About the direction I have no doubt; every source shows net arrivals collapsing. About exactly how far below zero 2025 landed, I have some. The survey data are noisy, and the Census Bureau's official 2026 estimate isn't out yet.

For half a century, the only question about the tub was how fast it was filling. The fastest way to change that turned out to be a hand on the faucet.