Key facts about the changing U.S. unauthorized immigrant population
The unauthorized immigrant population’s size and composition has ebbed and flowed significantly over the past 30 years.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The unauthorized immigrant population’s size and composition has ebbed and flowed significantly over the past 30 years.
The number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants has fallen since its peak of 6.9 million in 2007 and was lower in 2017 than in any year since 2001.
There were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017. The number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants declined since 2007.
In 2016, a third of unauthorized immigrant adults were proficient in English – up from a quarter in 2007.
Unauthorized immigrants make up a quarter of all U.S. foreign-born residents. Our new interactive offers data on unauthorized immigrants by state.
Lawful immigrants account for three-quarters of the foreign-born population in the U.S. – 33.8 million people out of 44.7 million people in 2015.
About 629,000 foreign visitors who were expected to leave the U.S. in fiscal 2016 were still in the U.S. when the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.
As the Mexican share of the total declined, the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. in 2015 was smaller than when the Great Recession ended.
About a million immigrants receive U.S. green cards each year, but fewer than half are new arrivals from other countries. The majority already live in the United States on temporary visas.
The unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. – 11.1 million in 2014 – has remained essentially stable since 2009 after nearly two decades of changes.
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