Illegal immigrants are a small % of total immigrant population in many countries

Its oddly refreshing to see the word "immigrant" used here properly.

Political debates in the US keep tossing around their term "migrants" as though immigrants are legal and migrants are not. That has nothing to do with it, you can immigrate illegally and you can migrate legally (we have plenty of migrant workers in the US legally every year).

Chalk one up for lazy politics and an inept public education system I guess. If immigration is going to be such an important issue people should be taught how it even works in the first place.

I would be more interested in seeing what % of immigrants entered respective country illegally.

At least in Germany there's a huge difference between illegal immigrants and immigrants without a legal status (term used in the article).

It is fairly easy to enter Germany illegally and gain legal status afterwards.

The data in this article is bullshit. For example, in Germany, there are no 15.8 Million immigrants. There are 15.8 M people with an immigration background, which have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Most of them are born in Germany. The actual number of immigrants is much smaller.

I don't know where they have a number of 680k illegal immigrants, but it is way too low. That's the number of people that needs to be expedited, but for a reason they are still there. The total number may be much higher once the slow German bureaucracy starts actually tackling the unknown bucket and sorting it in legal and illegal buckets.

It's still too high.

Illegal immigration often ruins the idea of immigration in the minds of the native population.