The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article today about the number of illegal immigrants currently living in America.

The article reports:

A new study has found that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is more than double what was previously estimated. 

Two Yale professors and an instructor at MIT Sloan School of Management conducted the extensive research and found that there are 22.1million illegal immigrants in the country. 

The widely estimated number is thought to be around 11.3million, but researchers Edward Kaplan, Jonathan Feinstein and Mohammad Fazel‐Zarandi claim that is way off.

‘Our original idea was just to do a sanity check on the existing number,’ said Kaplan, a professor of operations research at Yale School of Management. 

The article includes the following graph:

The article further states:

According to Yale Insights, the researchers also found the greatest growth of undocumented immigrants occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. They also said the population size has been relatively stable since 2008. 

‘The trajectory is the same. We see the same patterns happening, but they’re just understating the actual number of people who have made it here,’ said Fazel‐Zarandi, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and formerly a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in operations at the Yale School of Management.

‘They are capturing part of this population, but not the whole population,’ he added. 

All three researchers said they did not conduct the study with a political agenda, but know their findings will get ‘pulled and tugged in many ways’. 

There are a number of ways to deal with this problem. Part of the reason it has not been dealt with is the fact that both Republicans and Democrats see a benefit to those illegal aliens remaining here. The Democrats see them as a potential future voting bloc, and the Republicans see them as cheap labor for their major corporate donors. Because of that, there is no incentive to close the border and figure out who is here. A porous border is a security risk, and the border needs to be tightly controlled.