Did Illegal Migrants Ruin the United States Under Biden? The Claim Is Partially False.

The claim is that illegal migrants ruined the United States during Joe Biden's time in office — implying broad economic collapse, a crime surge, and systemic national harm attributable to unauthorized immigration. The verdict is partially false. The border crisis was real and serious. The ruin was not.

Start with what is unambiguously true. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2.47 million nationwide encounters at the southwest border in FY2023 and roughly 2.05 million in FY2024 — historically unprecedented numbers. Border communities, immigration courts, and cities that received large migrant populations faced genuine strain on shelters, schools, and local budgets. These are legitimate policy failures, not invented grievances.

But the jump from 'historic border crossings' to 'national ruin' collapses under the actual data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the U.S. unemployment rate fell from 6.4% in January 2021 to 4.1% by January 2025, and the economy added approximately 16 million jobs over Biden's term. The Bureau of Economic Analysis shows real GDP grew from roughly $19.5 trillion in Q1 2021 to approximately $22.4 trillion by Q3 2024. A country being ruined does not post those numbers. The Congressional Budget Office went further in its February 2024 demographic outlook, projecting that higher immigration levels — including undocumented migrants — would increase GDP by roughly $7 trillion over ten years and reduce the federal deficit by about $900 billion, because immigrants expand the labor force and pay taxes.

The crime argument fares no better. A 2024 Cato Institute analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data — one of the few states that tracks criminal convictions by immigration status — found that undocumented immigrants are convicted of crimes at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens across most crime categories. The American Immigration Council, citing Census and DHS data, confirms that foreign-born individuals are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born citizens nationally, and the overall U.S. violent crime rate declined in 2023 despite record border crossings. The National Academies of Sciences' comprehensive 2016 study — still the field's authoritative reference — found immigration, including unauthorized immigration, has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth, though it does create fiscal costs at the state and local level for services like education and healthcare.

The steelman version of the claim points to those local costs, and that is where it has genuine force. Cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver reported real budget pressure from migrant arrivals. Immigration courts are severely backlogged. These are serious, concrete problems. But the rhetorical move — taking localized, real costs and scaling them up to 'ruined the United States' — is where the claim breaks. It swaps a denominator. Local strain on a city shelter system is not national economic ruin, and a handful of high-profile crimes committed by undocumented individuals is not a crime wave when the aggregate data runs in the opposite direction.

The manipulation pattern here is straightforward: take a genuinely alarming real statistic (2.47 million border encounters), attach it to unrelated or contradicted outcomes (economic collapse, crime surge), and omit the countervailing data entirely. Watch for claims that cite border encounter numbers without mentioning GDP growth, unemployment, or crime-rate trends — the selective framing is the tell.