This graph shows the distribution of nationalities among documented immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1870. As we can see, over seven million people arrived in the US in this 50 year period, with the majority coming from Ireland, Germany and Britain. The largest groups, by far, were Irish and German, who together made up roughly two thirds of all immigrants to the US during this time. The reasons for this were because of the Irish Potato famine from 1845 to 1849, which resulted in the death or emigration of twenty to twenty five percent of the total Irish population, and a number of internal factors in Germany such as economic migration for farmers affected by industrialization, political/religious asylum, and in order to avoid conscription. One noteworthy exclusion from the information is of those transported to US as slaves, whose information was not recorded in this statistic (although the slave trade was abolished in 1808, the practice continued in the decades that followed).

Historical chart and dataset showing U.S. immigration statistics by year from 1960 to 2015.

Net migration for the United States was 4774029.00000 People in January of 2017, according to the United States Federal Reserve. Historically, Net migration for the United States reached a record high of 8859954.00000 in January of 1997 and a record low of 1556054.00000 in January of 1967. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Net migration for the United States - last updated from the United States Federal Reserve on June of 2025.

The estimated population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. stands at around ** million people. Although the number has stabilized, the United States has seen a spike in migrant encounters in the last few years, with over * million cases registered by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2023. This is a slight decrease from the previous year, when there were over *** million cases registered. Due to its proximity and shared border, Mexico remains the leading country of origin for most undocumented immigrants in the U.S., with California and Texas being home to the majority.

Immigration and political division

Despite the majority of the population having immigrant roots, the topic of immigration in the U.S. remains one of the country’s longest-standing political debates. Support among Republicans for restrictive immigration has grown alongside Democratic support for open immigration. This growing divide has deepened the polarization between the two major political parties, stifling constructive dialogue and impeding meaningful reform efforts and as a result, has led to dissatisfaction from all sides. In addition to general immigration policy, feelings toward illegal immigration in the U.S. also vary widely. For some, it's seen as a significant threat to national security, cultural identity, and economic stability. This perspective often aligns with support for stringent measures like Trump's proposed border wall and increased enforcement efforts. On the other hand, there are those who are more sympathetic toward undocumented immigrants, as demonstrated by support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Historical chart and dataset showing U.S. net migration by year from 1960 to 2024.

Between 1820 and 1957, over 4.6 million people emigrated from the island of Ireland to the United States. The period with the highest levels of migration came between 1845 and 1855 , as the Great Famine devastated Ireland's population, causing the deaths of roughly one million people and leading to the migration of one million more, most of which was to the United States. The period with the lowest levels of migration came in the 1930s and 40s, as the Great Depression and Second World War created an environment where migration to the US was difficult or impractical.

In the past four centuries, the population of the United States has grown from a recorded 350 people around the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1610, to an estimated 331 million people in 2020. The pre-colonization populations of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have proven difficult for historians to estimate, as their numbers decreased rapidly following the introduction of European diseases (namely smallpox, plague and influenza). Native Americans were also omitted from most censuses conducted before the twentieth century, therefore the actual population of what we now know as the United States would have been much higher than the official census data from before 1800, but it is unclear by how much. Population growth in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century has primarily been attributed to migration from the British Isles and the Transatlantic slave trade; however it is also difficult to assert the ethnic-makeup of the population in these years as accurate migration records were not kept until after the 1820s, at which point the importation of slaves had also been illegalized. Nineteenth century In the year 1800, it is estimated that the population across the present-day United States was around six million people, with the population in the 16 admitted states numbering at 5.3 million. Migration to the United States began to happen on a large scale in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first major waves coming from Ireland, Britain and Germany. In some aspects, this wave of mass migration balanced out the demographic impacts of the American Civil War, which was the deadliest war in U.S. history with approximately 620 thousand fatalities between 1861 and 1865. The civil war also resulted in the emancipation of around four million slaves across the south; many of whose ancestors would take part in the Great Northern Migration in the early 1900s, which saw around six million black Americans migrate away from the south in one of the largest demographic shifts in U.S. history. By the end of the nineteenth century, improvements in transport technology and increasing economic opportunities saw migration to the United States increase further, particularly from southern and Eastern Europe, and in the first decade of the 1900s the number of migrants to the U.S. exceeded one million people in some years. Twentieth and twenty-first century The U.S. population has grown steadily throughout the past 120 years, reaching one hundred million in the 1910s, two hundred million in the 1960s, and three hundred million in 2007. In the past century, the U.S. established itself as a global superpower, with the world's largest economy (by nominal GDP) and most powerful military. Involvement in foreign wars has resulted in over 620,000 further U.S. fatalities since the Civil War, and migration fell drastically during the World Wars and Great Depression; however the population continuously grew in these years as the total fertility rate remained above two births per woman, and life expectancy increased (except during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918).

Since the Second World War, Latin America has replaced Europe as the most common point of origin for migrants, with Hispanic populations growing rapidly across the south and border states. Because of this, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites, which has been the most dominant ethnicity in the U.S. since records began, has dropped more rapidly in recent decades. Ethnic minorities also have a much higher birth rate than non-Hispanic whites, further contributing to this decline, and the share of non-Hispanic whites is expected to fall below fifty percent of the U.S. population by the mid-2000s. In 2020, the United States has the third-largest population in the world (after China and India), and the population is expected to reach four hundred million in the 2050s.

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15,341 DAYS (October 1st, 1979 - September 30th, 2021)

This is a dataset that describes annual statistics regarding US immigration between the 1980-2021 fiscal years.

All data are official figures from the Department of Homeland Security's government website that have been compiled and structured by myself. There are several reasons for the decision to only examine immigration data from 1980 to 2021. Since 1976, a fiscal year for the US government has always started on October 1st and ended the following year on September 30th. If the years prior to 1976 were included, the data may be incorrectly represented and cause further confusion for viewers. Additionally, the United States only tracked refugee arrivals after the Refugee Act of 1980, a statistic that is prominently featured in the dataset. As a result, the start date of 1980 was chosen instead of 1976.

Data Sources

The primary data sources used were the "Yearbook of Immigration Statistics" webpages from the Department of Homeland Security. As a whole, the website not only provided figures about US immigration that were perfect for making time series analyses, but also explored the logistics behind the annual trends found.

1. The Department of Homeland Security's 2021 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics - The Office of Immigration Statistics' 2021 Flow Reports and Population Estimates provide text, tables, and charts on lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees, nonimmigrant admissions, naturalizations, enforcement actions, and the unauthorized population. Being the latest version released to date, the 2021 yearbook is the most comprehensive report publicly available and tends to feature data of past years for reference.
2. The Department of Homeland Security's Directory of Past Immigration Yearbooks - Past yearbooks were referenced in order to find the missing data from the fiscal years during 2000-2021. There is a single yearbook covering the fiscal years during 1996-1999, but that was the oldest publications featured in the directory.
3. The Center for Immigration Studies's File Library - In order to procure immigration data during the fiscal years of 1980-1999, I found free versions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's paywalled yearbooks from the Center for Immigration Studies. By doing so, I was able fill in the missing values and finish the dataset.

Statistics Being Tracked

• Immigrants Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status - Number of immigrants who obtained lawful permanent resident status in the United States, otherwise known as green card holders.
• Refugee Arrivals - Number of refugees who arrived in the United States. Excludes Amerasian immigrants except for the fiscal years of 1989 and 1991. Figures are based on refugee's arrival date.
• Noncitizen Apprehensions - Number of noncitizens apprehended in the United States. Data from 2020 to 2021 includes U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters that resulted in expulsion on public health grounds (due to the pandemic).
• Noncitizen Removals - Number of noncitizens removed from the United States. Removals are the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable noncitizen out of the United States based on an order of removal.
• Noncitizen Returns - Number of noncitizen returns from the United States. Returns are the confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable noncitizen out of the United States not based on an order of removal.

Dataset History

2023-01-07 - Dataset is created (465 days after the end of the 2021 fiscal year).

GitHub Repository - The same data but on GitHub.

Code Starter

Link to Notebook

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the majority of documented migration to the United States of American came from European countries. Between 1820 and 1957, of the approximate 41 million migrants to the US, over 34 million of these came from Europe. The most commonly documented countries of origin during this time were Germany (6.6 million), Italy (4.9 million), Ireland (4.6 million), Great Britain (4.5 million), and Russia (3.4 million). The first wave of mass migration came in the 1850s, as the Great famine crippled Ireland's population, and many in rural areas of mainland Europe struggled to adapt to industrialization, and economic opportunities attracted many in the 1870s, following the American Civil War. The 1880s saw another wave, as steam powered ships and lower fares made trans-Atlantic journeys much more affordable. The first wave of mass migration from Eastern and Southern Europe also arrived at this time, as industrialization and agricultural advancements led to high unemployment in these regions.

The majority of migrants to the United States settled in major urban centers, which allowed the expansion of industry, leading to the United States' emergence as one of the leading global economies at the turn of the twentieth century. The largest wave of migration to the United states during this period came in the first fifteen years of the 1900s. The influx of migrants from Northern and Western Europe had now been replaced by an influx from Eastern and Southern Europe (although migration from the British Isles was still quite high during this time). European migration fell to it's lowest levels in eighty years during the First World War, before fluctuating again in the interwar period, due to the Great Depression. As the twentieth century progressed, the continent with the highest levels of migration to the US gradually changed from Europe to Latin America, as economic opportunities in Western Europe improved, and the US' relationship with the Soviet Union and other Eastern, communist states became complicated.

This line chart displays net migration (people) by date using the aggregation sum in the United States. The data is about countries per year.

Between 1820 and 1957, more than six million people emigrated from Germany to the United States. The period with the highest levels of migration came during the 1850s and the 1880s, and over 250 thousand documented migrants came to the US from Germany in 1882 alone. The reasons for these mass migrations were not linked to individual events, but were because of the improved access to trans-Atlantic travel, poor economic opportunities at home (particularly for farmers, who struggled with the rapid industrialization of Germany), and to escape religious persecution in Europe. The periods with the lowest levels of migration from Germany were between 1915 and 1945, and were likely caused by the First and Second World Wars, and also the Great Depression.

United States - Equity Market Volatility Tracker: Immigration was 1.35681 Index in May of 2025, according to the United States Federal Reserve. Historically, United States - Equity Market Volatility Tracker: Immigration reached a record high of 2.35283 in April of 2025 and a record low of 0.00000 in February of 1985. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for United States - Equity Market Volatility Tracker: Immigration - last updated from the United States Federal Reserve on June of 2025.

This table contains 36 series, with data for years 1953 - 1976 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years), and was last released on 2012-02-16. This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Unit of measure (1 items: Persons ...) Geography (1 items: Canada ...) Origin of migrants (2 items: Overseas and the United States; Overseas ...) Intended occupations and dependents (18 items: Total immigration; Workers; managerial and administrative; Workers; professional; Total workers ...).

Explore the progression of average salaries for graduates in American Immigration History from 2020 to 2023 through this detailed chart. It compares these figures against the national average for all graduates, offering a comprehensive look at the earning potential of American Immigration History relative to other fields. This data is essential for students assessing the return on investment of their education in American Immigration History, providing a clear picture of financial prospects post-graduation.

In 2022, an estimated 10.99 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States. This is an increase from about 3.5 million unauthorized immigrants who lived in the United States in 1990.

This pie chart illustrates the distribution of degrees—Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral—among PERM graduates from American Immigration History. It shows the educational composition of students who have pursued and successfully obtained permanent residency through their qualifications in American Immigration History. This visualization helps to understand the diversity of educational backgrounds that contribute to successful PERM applications, reflecting the major’s role in fostering students’ career paths towards permanent residency in the U.S.

In the fiscal year of 2023, about 1.17 million immigrants received legal permanent resident status in the United States. This is an increase from the previous year, when about 1.02 people received legal permanent resident status. 1991 was the year with the highest number of residency permits granted in United States history - this was largely due to the signing of the Immigration Act of 1990, which greatly eased restrictions on legal migration and naturalization.

This linear chart displays the number of PERM cases filed for graduates in Laws Courses In Immigration, Asylum Refugee Law from 2020 to 2023, highlighting the trends and changes in sponsorship over the years. It provides a deep dive into how graduates in this specific major have engaged with potential employers for permanent residency in the U.S., illustrating the major’s effectiveness in connecting students with career opportunities that lead to permanent residency

Between 1820 and 1957, over 4.5 million people emigrated from Great Britain to the United States. The period with the highest levels of migration came during the 1860s, 70s and 80s, with almost 110 thousand people migrating in 1888 alone. The period with the lowest levels of migration came in the 1930s and early 40s, as the Great Depression caused an economic crisis across the globe, hitting the US and Great Britain particularly hard. Economic recovery in the late 1930s caused the migration rate to increase again, before the Second World War brought the numbers back down in the first half of the 1940s.

In 2024, approximately 948,000 million people migrated to the United Kingdom, while 517,000 people migrated from the UK, resulting in a net migration figure of 431,000. There have consistently been more people migrating to the United Kingdom than leaving it since 1993 when the net migration figure was negative 1,000. Although migration from the European Union has declined since the Brexit vote of 2016, migration from non-EU countries accelerated rapidly from 2021 onwards. In the year to June 2023, 968,000 people from non-EU countries migrated to the UK, compared with 129,000 from EU member states. Immigration and the 2024 election Since late 2022, immigration, along with the economy and healthcare, has consistently been seen by UK voters as one of the top issues facing the country. Despite a pledge to deter irregular migration via small boats, and controversial plans to send asylum applicants to Rwanda while their claims are being processed, Rishi Sunak's Conservative government lost the trust of the public on this issue. On the eve of the last election, 20 percent of Britons thought the Labour Party would be the best party to handle immigration, compared with 13 percent who thought the Conservatives would handle it better. Sunak and the Conservatives went on to lose this election, suffering their worst defeat in modern elections. Historical context of migration The first humans who arrived in the British Isles, were followed by acts of conquest and settlement from Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. In the early modern period, there were also significant waves of migration from people fleeing religious or political persecution, such as the French Huguenots. More recently, large numbers of people also left Britain. Between 1820 and 1957, for example, around 4.5 million people migrated from Britain to America. After World War Two, immigration from Britain's colonies and former colonies was encouraged to meet labour demands. A key group that migrated from the Caribbean between the late 1940s and early 1970s became known as the Windrush generation, named after one of the ships that brought the arrivals to Britain.