President Trump this weekend lamented what he characterized as an invasion of illegal immigrants that is “very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years.”

But illegal border crossings represent a relatively small share of the number of people who enter the country, legally or otherwise, in any given year, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s data.

A September 2017 Office of Immigration Statistics data brief estimated that in fiscal year 2016, the latest year for which complete data is available, there were 170,000 successful illegal border crossings occurring outside of authorized ports of entry. That’s down by roughly 90 percent since 2000, and it’s about one-seventh of the roughly 1.2 million immigrants who obtained lawful permanent resident status via a green card, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The number of successful border crossings doesn’t include illegal entries that happened via border checkpoints (people smuggled in via vehicles, for instance), or over sea. That number’s not available for 2016, but in previous years it added anywhere from 10 to 20 percent to the total number of illegal entries, according to a 2016 Institute for Defense Analyses report commissioned by Homeland Security.

It’s worth pointing out that at the policy level there’s no direct relation between the number of green cards granted and the number of illegal crossings in a given year. Illegal entries don’t decrease the number of green cards available.

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