On incentives for self-deportation:

Offers of up to $3,000 per person have helped spur more than 200,000 migrants to “self-deport” from the U.S. — but about half made the move while locked up in detention centers, according to a report Tuesday.

The voluntary mass exodus started slowly, with only about 24,000 people signing up during the six months after the Department of Homeland Security launched the widely advertised program in May 2025, Axios said, citing internal agency data.

But White House officials — including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — pressured DHS to ramp up the operation, called Project Homecoming, an unidentified source told Axios.

“They wanted like thousands pushed through on a daily basis, and we were putting through like dozens,” the source said.

Self-deportation actually wasn’t uncommon in the much more distant past – a past that included a lack of government-funded welfare for immigrants. It was sink or swim, except for voluntary charities which included help from religious and/or ethnic communities.

Later, there were requirements that to come here legally through the family-based program, an immigrant’s relatives (or other sponsors in certain cases) who were already here legally were required to document that they have the funds to help support the immigrant if need be. This still occurs for those particular programs for legal immigrants, but if you look at the link you’ll see there are many circumstances where the immigrants are nevertheless eligible for government aid.

And today, apparently 61% of households in the US headed by an illegal immigrant receive means-tested government aid of some type. Here are some figures:

Roughly half of all immigrant-headed households in the U.S. use welfare — and among illegal immigrant homes in particular, it’s even higher, at 61%, according to a new study Wednesday that argues that’s another reason to enforce immigration laws.

By comparison, just 37% of U.S.-born households use welfare, the Center for Immigration Studies calculated, based on 2024 Census Bureau data.

The numbers challenge the notion that illegal immigrants can’t get assistance.

Do you remember back in 2012 when Mitt Romney talked about self-deportation of illegal aliens, and he was criticized for it?:

Governor Romney: “Well the answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they could do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”

Will this work? Unlikely. Lessons from Mexican migrants, which comprise more than half of the unauthorized population and, the country closest and presumably the least costly for “self-deportation,” suggest otherwise. Studies show that during the 1970s and early 1980s, roughly one of every two migrants returned home within a year – and seventy-five percent left within two years – meaning most did in fact “self-deport.” The vast majority of Mexicans came not to settle, but to earn enough money to better their and their families’ lives at home. But this pattern – called circular migration by scholars – starting changing in the late 1980s (also when the United States began hardening its southern border). Today, fewer than one in ten immigrants return each year to Mexico. Thirty odd years ago Romney’s policy of self-deportation occurred regularly, today it does not.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the phenomenon of self-deportation was called “return migration” and the numbers were significant. Here’s some data (the article was written in 2017):

Thirty million migrants moved from Europe to the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913). Yet one in three of these arrivals eventually returned to Europe, a rate of return migration that is even higher than today.

[A personal note: one of my relatives who came here in the first years of the 20th century had trouble making it in the US and was unhappy here. He had come from Russia prior to the revolution and was so hopeful about the possibilities of life under Communism that he returned to the USSR some time during the 1920s. A bad bet, it turns out. He was still alive when I was a child, and my (Communist) uncle, who lived near us, used to periodically visit the USSR, bringing back a ton of boring slides that we were forced to politely watch. My uncle’s trips to the USSR included visiting this self-deported cousin or whatever he was. My uncle bought him many things to make his life easier, because he was living a subsistence existence, whereas my uncle had amassed quite a cozy nest egg living under evil capitalism.]