Changes in Immigration Enforcement and Population

Evidence has emerged to support our hypothesis that more robust immigration enforcement is a significant contributing factor to the increase in median household income in the U.S. since mid-2025.

Updated monthly population estimates were released last month, with the revisions covering the period from March 2020 through November 2025. From March 2020 through June 2021, most estimates were revised upward by very small amounts, but for each month from July 2021 onward, all estimates were revised downward. The magnitude of revisions start out very small, but increase in magnitude as the revisions draw closer the present.

The negative revisions show three notable shifts as they increase in magnitude. The first shift took place after June 2024 as the cumulative size of the negative revisions grew larger than 100,000. The second shift took place in February 2025 as the cumulative negative revisions surpassed 200,000. The third shift clocks from July 2025 with the size of the negative revisions growing from month to month.

The following chart visualizes the “before” and “after” population data for the period from January 2021 through November 2025 and with the newly reported population estimate for December 2025.

The three shifts follow notable political events that would have a potential outsized effect on U.S. immigration. The first shift took place after President Joseph Biden’s disastrous debate with then presidential candidate Donald Trump on 28 June 2024, which ultimately led to his withdrawal from the race several weeks later. This event cemented Donald Trump as the likely next U.S. President and since he campaigned strongly against the unrestricted immigration policies of the Biden administration, it would be reasonable for that event to have a small negative effect on immigrant flows into the U.S.

The second shift came after President Donald Trump was sworn into office on 20 January 2026 and began implementing his immigration control agenda. That change saw the negative revisions jump in the early months of the new Trump administration, which slowed going into summer.

The third shift starting from July 2025 is the most notable one and coincides with the period in which the Trump administration introduced its program to incentivize unlawful immigrants to self-deport from the U.S. with a cash payment and free travel to their home countries. This is the immigration-related policy we think had the biggest effect on median household income because it would be especially attractive to immigrants with very low incomes. The removal of large numbers of this portion of the work force would automatically lead to an increase in median household income with the increasing departures of the lowest income earners, which itself tracks from July 2025 onward.

Comparing November 2025′s population estimate from the pre-revision level of 343,078,000 to the post-revision level of 342,439,000 underscores the magnitude of the revision as the estimated resident population of the U.S. dropped by 639,000. At the same time, since the previous population estimates were based on a model of population growth that was established during the Biden administration, it works as a counterfactual, or rather, a reasonable estimate of what the U.S. population would have been if not for the significant political events that altered both it and the nation’s median household income.

References

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Table 2.6. Personal Income and Its Disposition, Monthly, Personal Income and Outlays, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Monthly, Middle of Month. Population. [Online Database (via Federal Reserve Economic Data)]. 20 February 2026.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “A picture illustrating the concept of a revision to U.S. Census population estimates”. We’re amazed at how well the result came out, which is remarkable considering how short the prompt was.