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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

The 2000 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a collection of tables about immigration for the fiscal year. The yearbook tables include data about:Foreign nationals who came to the United States during a fiscal year. This includes lawful permanent residents, temporary visitors (nonimmigrants), refugees and asylees, and naturalizations.Immigration enforcement actions, including alien apprehensions, removals, and returns.

The 2000 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provide data on foreign nationals who are granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., immigrants who receive a “green card”), admitted as temporary nonimmigrants, granted asylum or refugee status, or are naturalized. The Yearbook also presents data on immigration enforcement actions, including apprehensions and arrests, removals, and returns.

Acknowledgement

The following table is imported from the 2019 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics under the Department of Homeland Security:

The 2019 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provide data on foreign nationals who are granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., immigrants who receive a “green card”), admitted as temporary nonimmigrants, granted asylum or refugee status, or are naturalized. The Yearbook also presents data on immigration enforcement actions, including apprehensions and arrests, removals, and returns.

Table 33. Aliens Apprehended: Fiscal Years 1925 to 2019 (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table33)

Inspiration

The data was collected to observe trends in history reflecting the number of immigrants apprehended.

The 2014 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provide data on foreign nationals who are granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., immigrants who receive a “green card”), admitted as temporary nonimmigrants, granted asylum or refugee status, or are naturalized. The Yearbook also presents data on immigration enforcement actions, including apprehensions and arrests, removals, and returns.

The purpose of this project was to consolidate data concerning US asylum seekers. The reason for doing this is that it is somewhat difficult to find a complete picture of US asylum. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publishes immigration statistics annually in their "Yearbook of Immigration Statistics." Each yearbook contains numerous tables that are divided amongst several topics, such as Nonimmigrant Admissions, Immigration Enforcement Actions, U.S. Naturalizations, Refugees and Asylees, and Lawful Permanent Residents (or LPRs). However, I felt there was not enough data in the Refugee and Asylees section; the focus is about how many individuals were granted asylum and how many refugees were admitted. Although there is more data, Yearbook editions 2005 and onward do not track any data about applications (i.e. how many were accepted and denied). Yearbook edition 2004 is the last edition to track asylum cases received, approved, denied, completed, and adjudicated. There are also several archived Yearbooks on the DHS website from the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS)--the agency that was succeeded by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)--that tracked some similar details through 2005. Note that INS was an agency under the Department of Justice (DOJ) while the USCIS is an agency under the DHS.

The majority of the data comes from the USCIS. Unlike the DHS Yearbooks, the USCIS has publicly available documents (PDFs, CSVs) that track details about asylum cases from at least as early as 2009 through the present day. Please note that there is some collection/publication inconsistency between Years 2009 - 2012; there is almost no monthly data for 2009, the documents I used to represent quarterly data ("All USCIS Application and Petition Form Types") do not appear until 2012, and the 2012 quarterly data only tracks asylum forms received. The USCIS represents its data in three time units, albeit in different document publications and in different places: monthly, quarterly, and yearly. The monthly and quarterly documents can be found in the same location--"Citizenship and Immigration" data under Reports and Studies--while what available Yearbooks for the USCIS are found in "Annual Statistical Reports" under the same topic. Also note that the USCIS has changed the way it has published data in recent years; the definition of Denied has changed for quarterly reports Years 2020 - 2022, the quarterly reports contain a Year-to-Date section for several details Years 2021 and 2022, and monthly data for 2022 is mostly published in CSV format where the topics are broken into several files.

It is important to note that there are two types of asylum in the United States: asylum granted affirmatively and asylum granted defensively. Each type is considered the responsibility of a different agency. The USCIS is responsible for affirmative asylum, which I believe is represented by data for Form I-589 "Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal." The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is responsible for defensive asylum. Please note that applicants who are in illegal status (i.e. have an illegal presence in the country or have an expired visa) and are denied asylum by the USCIS are referred to immigration courts under the EOIR for enforcement proceedings. While in an immigration court, applicants may request for asylum again and the immigration judge must review the merits of their case and issue a decision independent from the USCIS. This is how the EOIR receives defensive asylum cases. EOIR data is represented only in yearly format and in two different forms: Yearbooks and online sheets that contain data as far back as 2008. Both of these sources are found under "Statistics and Reports" on the EOIR website and the online sheets are also accessible at data.gov. The EOIR is also an agency under the DOJ.

It is important to note that asylum data is volatile. Throughout this project, I noticed for USCIS data that the quarterly data did not entirely match the respective sums of the monthly data (e.g. annual sums from monthly data would be different from annual sums from quarterly data). Several reasons are given by various USCIS sources: human error, the date of which the database was queried, post-adjudication decisions, processing time delays, and perhaps even which database was queried. If you read the footnotes of the USCIS sources, their primary source could either be from the Directorate of Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations (RAIO), the USCIS Asylum Division, USCIS Asylum Pre-Screening Officer (APSO) Database, Performance Analysis Systems (PAS), or the Office of Performance and Quality (though I am unsure whether any of these sources is the parent of another source). Because of this, I compared monthly and quarterly sums to a...

The 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a compendium of tables that provide data on foreign nationals who are granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., immigrants who receive a “green card”), admitted as temporary nonimmigrants, granted asylum or refugee status, or are naturalized.