Claim about influx of undocumented migrants outpacing American births is misleading

Many people are critical of how U.S.-Mexico border crossings are handled as large numbers of migrants have recently attempted to cross into the United States without authorization. 

VERIFY reader Mary texted us to ask if it’s true there are more undocumented migrants entering the U.S. each month than babies being born in the United States. 

The claim appears to originate from a late-December post on X that was reshared by Elon Musk. The post claimed “there are officially more arriving each month than there are children being born to American mothers.” The post includes a chart titled “American Births vs. Illegal Immigrants” showing that “encounters” have apparently been slightly higher than births in September and October of 2023.

THE QUESTION

Are more migrants entering the U.S. illegally each month than new births in the U.S.?

THE SOURCES

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

THE ANSWER

This claim is misleading. There is no official data that tracks the number of undocumented migrants entering the U.S. over any period of time. The chart in the viral post uses U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data on encounters, which is a broader dataset that includes CBP interactions with people who try to legally enter the United States and people who don’t actually cross the border.

WHAT WE FOUND

This claim is misleading because there is no official count of how many undocumented migrants enter the United States. The viral post uses a dataset from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) called “encounters.” 

“Encounters” are not a simple count of the number of people that CBP catches unlawfully entering the United States. Encounters also include people who attempt to lawfully enter the U.S. at a port of entry but are denied, people the CBP have already encountered previously and people who don’t successfully enter the United States. 

The number of CBP encounters limited to just the people apprehended for unlawfully entering the U.S. is lower than the number of U.S. births. However, CBP does not catch every single person who unlawfully enters the U.S., which means it’s still possible that the number could be higher.

U.S. Births 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collects and publishes provisional data on the number of births in the U.S., and finalizes that data a couple of years later. The most recent three months for which the CDC has provisional data are September, October and November of 2023.

There were 305,000 births in September, 308,000 in October, and 291,000 in November, according to CDC data.

Encounters

“Encounters” refer to instances in which migrants come into contact with two CBP divisions: U.S. Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations (OFO).

This includes the number of people Border Patrol apprehends for unlawfully being in the U.S., people classified as “inadmissible” by the OFO and people expelled from the U.S. by Border Patrol or the OFO.

The OFO operates at official ports of entry, which cannot be crossed without authorization. The OFO’s encounters are with “inadmissibles,” which is a group of people who have not unlawfully entered the United States. Instead, “inadmissibles” are people who seek lawful admission into the United States at a port of entry but are denied, people presenting themselves to seek humanitarian protection under U.S. laws, and individuals who withdraw an application for admission and return to their countries of origin within a short timeframe, CBP says.

Additionally, encounters can count the same person more than one time. In its August 2023 monthly update, the CBP reported that 11% of its encounters that month were with people who had at least one prior encounter in the past 12 months. The CBP doesn’t report how many people it encounters more than once in the same month.

The total number of CBP encounters during those same three months, which is the data used in the viral post, was about 341,000 in September, 309,000 in October and 309,000 in November.

Excluding OFO encounters from the dataset leaves just the Border Patrol’s encounters, which limits encounters to those in which someone was apprehended for unlawfully entering the United States. Border Patrol’s encounters numbered 220,000 in September, 190,000 in October and 192,000 in November. This is assuming that each encounter is a different person and all of the encountered people successfully entered the country, neither of which is always the case.

However, there is no official data of how many people cross the border undetected. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that since 2014 CBP has apprehended about 70-80% of people who illegally cross the borders each year.