Did more non immigrants come to the USA during the Biden administration than during the 70 years of Ellis Island
Executive summary
The short answer is: not conclusively — the historical record shows Ellis Island processed roughly 12 million immigrants from 1892 to 1954, while reporting about the Biden administration’s four-year period (2021–2024) offers competing tallies and interpretations that claim both that the Biden years rival or exceed the Ellis Island era and that they fall short, depending on definitions and data sources [1] [2] [3] [4]. The disagreement hinges on how “came to the USA” is defined (legal immigrants vs. total arrivals including unauthorized or temporary migrants), the time window used, and which agency’s counts are credited.
1. What Ellis Island’s numbers actually are
Historians and public institutions consistently report that the Ellis Island immigration station processed a bit more than 12 million people during its operational life — commonly cited as the period 1892–1954, with the mass-migration peak concentrated in the decades around 1900–1924 when annual arrivals sometimes reached the hundreds of thousands and 1907 exceeded one million in a single year [1] [2] [5] [6]. That 12 million figure is widely used as the benchmark in contemporary comparisons because it represents documented processing at a single federal entry point over roughly six decades [2] [1].
2. What the Biden-era claims say and where they come from
Recent advocacy groups, opinion pieces, and some legal commentary assert that immigration during the Biden administration represents the largest surge in U.S. history and in some reckonings has outpaced the Ellis Island era — for example, FAIR [4] and several legal or immigration-focused commentaries [3] [7] point to aggregated “new immigrant” figures or to press compilations that conclude the 2021–2024 pace exceeds historical peaks. One oft-cited claim in those sources is an average of about 2.4 million new immigrants per year between 2021 and 2024, attributed in their summaries to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculation; that pace, if sustained multiple years, is presented as comparable to or surpassing Ellis Island totals [3].
3. Numbers on both sides don’t measure the same thing
The core reporting problem is apples-to-oranges measurement: Ellis Island’s 12 million was the count of people processed at a physical immigrant inspection station over decades [1] [2], while modern claims about the Biden years often mix categories — lawful permanent residents, admissions, temporary migrants, asylum seekers, and encounters at the border — and sometimes conflate “entries” with “new immigrants” without consistent sourcing [3] [4]. That methodological opacity means one can cherry-pick definitions to make the Biden years look larger or smaller than the Ellis Island era; several of the sources making the “Biden larger” claim do not publish a single, transparent dataset that lines up directly with the Ellis Island processing records cited elsewhere [4] [3].
4. What the best-supported comparison in the provided reporting shows
Using the two most directly comparable numbers available in the reporting provided here — roughly 12 million processed at Ellis Island over its operational life [1] [2] versus an asserted CBO-based average of 2.4 million “new immigrants” per year in 2021–24 [3] — a cautious arithmetic read yields roughly 9.6 million over four years, which is less than the 12 million Ellis Island total. However, advocacy groups and opinion writers interpret broader flows to claim the Biden period “surpasses” Ellis Island, and those claims rest on different counting choices and agendas [4] [8]. Given the divergent framings in the reporting, the evidence provided does not permit a definitive, single-number verdict.
5. Conclusion and how to read competing claims
The reporting supplied establishes two uncontested facts — Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954 [1] [2], and multiple contemporary sources assert record-high immigration during the Biden years, sometimes citing an about-2.4-million-per-year figure for 2021–24 [3] [4]. Whether “more non-immigrants came to the USA during the Biden administration than during the 70 years of Ellis Island” therefore depends on the definitions and windows chosen; with strictly comparable measures in the sources provided, the Biden four-year total does not clearly exceed the cumulative Ellis Island tally, but political and advocacy reporting frames the data to argue the opposite, revealing distinct agendas in play [3] [4] [8].