Illegal border crossing vs visa overstaying statistics

1. Claims on the Table: Which Pathway Produces More Unauthorized Residents?

The central claim under scrutiny is whether visa overstays outnumber illegal border crossings among people residing in the U.S. without authorization. Multiple studies previously concluded that overstays were larger. The Center for Migration Studies reported in 2019 that for the seventh consecutive year, 62% of newly undocumented were visa overstays and 38% were border crossers, a long-running finding that shaped policy debates ^[3]. More recent summaries from Pew showed the unauthorized population rose to a record 14 million in 2023 and emphasized that much of that increase came from people who had some form of legal entry or temporary protection rather than classic clandestine cross-border entries, suggesting overstays and status changes contributed materially to the total ^[5]. At the same time, Border Patrol encounters spiked in FY2023, registering 2,063,692 encounters, indicating a sharp increase in attempted or detected illegal crossings that year ^[2].

2. Government Numbers: Overstay Rates Look Small — But the Picture Is Tricky

U.S. government overstay reporting provides precise mechanics: for FY2023 CBP reported 39,005,712 expected departures and an overall overstay rate of 1.45% with a suspected in-country overstay rate of 1.31%, and a drop in suspected in-country overstays from 795,167 in FY2022 to 430,125 in FY2023 ^[1]. Those figures imply that measured overstays in a given year are modest as a share of visitors, while CBP enforcement encounters at the southwest border reached the millions, reflecting a substantial enforcement burden ^{[2] [1]}. The government’s entry/exit system measures an “upper bound” and is focused on matching departures, which creates classification and timing issues; the raw overstay percentage therefore does not map cleanly to estimates of the total unauthorized population ^[4].

3. Independent Analysts Warn: Measurement Methods Drive Conclusions

Independent research groups and policy analysts emphasize that methodological choices determine whether overstays “exceed” border crossings. The National Foundation for American Policy and others have criticized DHS overstay reports for relying on conservative, upper-bound matches and for conflating unmatched departure records with actual unlawful presence, arguing that overstays can be overstated when data are incomplete and later-corrected as systems reconcile records ^[4]. Conversely, long-running CMS analyses used demographic modeling and census-based household survey data to attribute large shares of the newly undocumented to overstays; that approach produced the repeated finding that overstays outnumbered border entries prior to 2020, but it depends on different assumptions and lagged data ^{[3] [6]}. Disagreement is therefore rooted in measurement, not mere rhetoric.

4. Trends and Timing: Why 2019, 2021 and 2023 Paint Different Pictures

Temporal shifts are essential: CMS findings showing overstays dominating were based on pre-2020 flows and trends that emphasized air arrivals and in-country status changes. Pew’s 2021 and 2025 analyses show evolving origin patterns, with an increasing share of unauthorized residents coming from outside Mexico and Central America and a record total in 2023 driven by asylum and temporary status dynamics ^{[6] [5]}. Simultaneously, FY2023 CBP enforcement data recorded a large spike in border encounters, which affects short-term comparisons between crossings and overstays ^[2]. Put simply, studies sampling different years, methods and populations can validly reach different conclusions; the balance between overstays and border crossings is dynamic.

5. What Policymakers and Analysts Should Watch Next

Accurate policy responses require reconciled metrics: improving the entry/exit matching system would reduce spurious overstay counts, while refined demographic analyses can clarify the composition of the unauthorized population over multi-year windows ^{[1] [4]}. Border enforcement statistics should be interpreted alongside long-term population estimates to avoid conflating enforcement encounters with net increase in unauthorized residents ^{[2] [6]}. Until data systems and methodologies converge, claims that one pathway definitively “exceeds” the other remain contingent on which dataset and timeframe you use, and both overstays and illegal border crossings will continue to be relevant for immigration policy and enforcement planning ^{[4] [3]}.