Comment by indecisive_user

The report itself is interesting [0] and I recommend reading it for good context.

Here's a couple things that stood out to me:

  - Measuring net migration is difficult. The report from TFA estimates a net migration between –295,000 and -10,000 for 2025. Some reports estimate much lower numbers, and some reports actually estimated a positive net migration for 2025. In any case, it's certainly trending downward.

  - While there *has* been a decrease in the number of green cards and work visas (H1B's), it seems that the majority of the drop off has been from refusing to take refugees (from ~100k in 2024 to ~10k in 2025), basically eliminating asylum petitions at the border (from ~1.4M in 2024 to ~70k in 2025), and reduction in "Entries without inspection", aka illegal crossings that do not encounter law enforcement (~270,000k in 2024 to ~30k in 2025)

Given these numbers, I'm actually surprised the estimated net migration wasn't lower. I'm not sure if there's another component that made up for it, or if their estimates are just on the conservative side.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...