According to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, government data measuring the decline in the immigrant population may be overstated, potentially due to a decrease in the number of immigrants willing to participate in surveys.

Researchers at the St. Louis Fed, using employment data for their estimates, calculated that the U.S. immigrant population decreased by 123,000 to 627,000 from January through November of this year. This figure is significantly lower than the decline of 1.86 million people reported by the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS results also indicated an increase of 3.8 million in the native-born population, a surge the researchers deemed "implausibly large."

St. Louis Fed researchers Alexander Bick and Kevin Bloodworth II wrote in a blog post published Monday, "This suggests that the primary reason for the large negative net migration figure in the CPS data is a decline in the willingness of non-naturalized immigrants still in the U.S. to participate in the survey, who may be cautious about engaging with government data collection."

From January to November 2025, response rates for the CPS survey dropped significantly across several demographic groups. The analysis pointed out that the decline in participation among non-naturalized immigrants was approximately 10 percentage points greater than the declines observed among native-born workers and naturalized citizens.