How Many Immigrants Are In The US? More People Overstay Visas Then Cross The Border Illegally

President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful" wall along the U.S.-Mexico border won’t do anything to stop millions of immigrants from illegally overstaying their visas while continuing to live indefinitely within the nation’s borders.

A study published Monday by the Center for Migration Studies found visa overstays have vastly outnumbered the rate at which undocumented immigrants were crossing the southern border since 2007, accounting for 66 percent of new additions to the total undocumented immigrant population in America by 2014.

Read: Stopping Border Immigration: As Trump Builds His Wall, A Battle Wages Over Human Rights Conflicts

Mexico remained the leading native-nation for undocumented immigrants and visa overstays, the study reported. What’s more, visa overstays accounted for 42 percent of the total undocumented population by 2014, with 600,000 more people overstaying their visas in the United States than crossing into the country illegally since 2007.

"The Trump administration has made the construction of an 'impregnable' 2,000-mile wall across the length of the U.S.-Mexico border a centerpiece of its executive orders on immigration and its broader immigration enforcement strategy," Donald Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies and co-author of the newly released report, told International Business Times via email Monday. "However, the initiative has been broadly criticized as expensive, inefficient, ineffective, and detrimental to local communities, the environment and property rights."

Trump has used his time in power to shine a spotlight on illegal immigration into the U.S. He has promised to overhaul the nation’s visa application and admission process but focused primarily on increasing immigrant detention and deportation rates of undocumented aliens in his first 100 days in office.

The president's proposed border wall was already facing numerous challenges, including a potentially hefty price tag that was more than $20 billion, as well as the ongoing human rights crisis for migrants making the arduous journey across the dangerous southern terrain.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants have been found dead along the U.S.-Mexico border. Local activists, volunteer border patrol groups and Customs and Border Protection alike agreed Trump’s wall will do little to deter migrants from continuing to make the trek, as International Business Times previously reported.

"Our findings offer an additional reason to question the necessity and value of constructing a wall," Kerwin said. "The large and growing percentage of newly undocumented persons will bypass the wall entirely and simply overstay their visas."