The EU’s challenges related to irregular migration seem less daunting when compared to the situation in the US – whose 6 000 miles of land borders are of similar length to the EU’s 10 000 km of external land borders. According to the US Customs and Border Protection authority, the number of nationwide encounters has increased significantly in recent years, reaching 3.3 million in 2023 (see Figure 3). This is almost nine times higher than the number of detections of irregular entries at the EU’s external borders in the same year. The Pew Research Center estimated that 10.5 million unauthorised immigrants lived in the US in 2021.
Irregular entries in the EU and the US (in millions)
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