Immigration in the United States in 2026

How Many Immigrants Are in the United States in 2026?

About 51.9 million foreign-born people live in the United States in 2026, roughly 15 percent of the population. That is down from a record 53.3 million in January 2025, the largest immigrant population ever recorded in American history and a milestone the Census Bureau own models had not expected until around 2042. Within months the number began to fall, dropping by more than a million by June 2025, the first decline in the US foreign-born population since the 1960s.

Set against the country as a whole, that is a large but not unprecedented share. Our US population data puts the total at about 341.8 million, and the foreign-born share of roughly 15 percent matches the record set back in 1890, when the great transatlantic wave was at its height. It is a dramatic turnaround from 1970, when immigrants made up just 4.7 percent of the population, and it sits within the wider movement of people traced in our world population statistics.

The sharper change is in the flow rather than the stock. Net international migration has fallen from about 3.3 million a year at its 2023 peak to a projected 321,000 in 2026, a decline of roughly 90 percent in three years that the Census Bureau described as historic. Because immigration has been the main driver of US population growth for two decades, that shift has consequences well beyond demography, reaching into the labor market, housing, and the growth outlook set out in our US GDP report.

One point about terminology is worth settling early, because it explains many apparent contradictions in the coverage. The foreign-born population, sometimes called the immigrant population, counts everyone living in the United States who was born abroad, regardless of status: naturalised citizens, green-card holders, students, temporary workers and unauthorised residents alike. Net migration, by contrast, measures the flow of arrivals minus departures in a given year. A falling flow does not immediately shrink the stock, and a shrinking stock reflects deaths and departures as well as fewer arrivals, so the two numbers move differently and should never be used interchangeably.

A record high, then the first fall since the 1960s: the US foreign-born population climbed from under 10 million in 1970 to a record 53.3 million in January 2025 before declining, with its share of the population back near the 1890 record.

US Foreign-Born Population by Year

The table tracks the foreign-born population, its share of the total, and estimates of the unauthorised population from 1970 to 2026. Three phases stand out: a long climb from 9.6 million in 1970 to 40 million by 2010, a slower rise through the 2010s, then a sharp acceleration between 2021 and 2025 that added roughly 8 million people in four years, followed by the decline of the past year. Unauthorised-population figures in the final column are estimates with wide margins of error and should be read as approximations rather than counts.

What Happened to the US Immigrant Population?

The 2021 to 2025 surge was the fastest sustained increase in modern American history. The foreign-born population rose from about 45.3 million to 53.3 million in roughly four years, driven by post-pandemic labor demand, a large rise in border encounters and asylum claims, and humanitarian parole programmes for arrivals from Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. The pace was such that the Census Bureau repeatedly revised its own projections upward.

That surge was concentrated in a short window and in particular groups, which is part of why it registered so strongly in the data. Arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua rose steeply under parole programmes, Ukrainian arrivals followed the 2022 invasion, and border encounters reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 before falling sharply after the mid-2024 asylum restrictions. Because these flows were unusually fast and unusually visible, they also became the focus of the policy shift that followed.

The reversal since early 2025 has been almost as abrupt. Policy changes beginning in mid-2024, including restrictions on asylum applications, followed by expanded enforcement and the wind-down of several parole programmes, cut new arrivals sharply while departures rose. Counting immigrants together with their US-born children gives about 93 million people, roughly 28 percent of the US population, so even a shrinking foreign-born population leaves immigration central to American demography, much as it shapes the metro areas covered in our largest US metro areas data.

Historical perspective helps here too. The foreign-born share of the US population was around 14 to 15 percent for most of the period between 1860 and 1920, fell steadily after the restrictive quota laws of the 1920s to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970, and has climbed almost continuously since. Viewed across a century and a half, the present moment looks less like an aberration than a return to the long-run American norm, though the origins of immigrants today are far more diverse than in the European-dominated waves of the nineteenth century.

How Much Has Net Migration Fallen?

Net international migration, arrivals minus departures, is the single clearest measure of the change. It ran at roughly 3.3 million in 2023, the highest on record, and the Census Bureau projects about 321,000 for 2026. To put that in perspective, the 2026 figure is close to the levels of the early 1990s, and it is far below the roughly 1 million a year that was typical through the 2010s.

The macroeconomic implications are significant, because the US working-age population grows slowly without immigration. Lower net migration reduces labor-force growth, which in turn lowers the economy potential growth rate, an effect the Congressional Budget Office and Federal Reserve have both flagged in their projections. It also feeds into inflation and wage dynamics in immigrant-heavy sectors, a link that runs alongside the price data in our US inflation report.

It is worth noting what the Census projection actually is. The Bureau assumed that the conditions observed in late 2025 would continue, doubled its estimate of departures for the 2026 period, and then held the resulting figure constant for 2027 and 2028. That is a deliberately conservative technical assumption rather than a forecast of policy, and the Bureau itself cautioned that the 2025 data spans two very different policy environments, making simple year-to-year comparisons misleading.

From 3.3 million to about 321,000: net international migration peaked in 2023 and is projected to fall roughly 90 percent by 2026, a change the Census Bureau described as a historic decline.

Why Do US Immigration Estimates Disagree?

Anyone reading immigration coverage in 2026 will encounter numbers that do not match, and the gaps are large. For 2025 net migration, the Congressional Budget Office estimated roughly +400,000, while the Brookings Institution put the figure between -295,000 and -10,000, a spread of about 700,000 people. Separately, analyses of Current Population Survey data by Pew Research Center and the Center for Immigration Studies suggested the foreign-born population fell by around 2 million, and a December 2025 Department of Homeland Security statement put departures at 2.5 million.

The differences come from method, not politics. Departures are the hardest part of migration to measure, since nobody is required to register when they leave, so each body makes different assumptions about how many people left voluntarily and how enforcement affected that. Survey-based estimates of the foreign-born population also carry sampling error and were affected by revised population controls, and net migration is not directly comparable to a change in population, because the latter also reflects deaths. The honest summary is that the direction of travel is clear, a substantial decline, while the magnitude remains genuinely uncertain.

This uncertainty is not unusual in migration statistics, only unusually large right now. Even in stable years, estimates of the unauthorised population from different research bodies routinely differ by two or three million, because the population being counted has every reason to avoid official contact. What has changed is that the legal population, normally measured with reasonable confidence, is now also moving fast enough that annual surveys struggle to keep pace. Readers encountering a single confident figure in a headline should assume a range sits behind it.

Agencies disagree by over 700,000: estimates of 2025 US net migration range from about +400,000 (CBO) to between -295,000 and -10,000 (Brookings), reflecting different assumptions about departures rather than settled fact.

Which Countries Do US Immigrants Come From?

Mexico remains by far the largest single origin, at about 11.1 million people, roughly a fifth of all US immigrants, followed by India, China, the Philippines and El Salvador. The composition, however, has been shifting for years. Between 2010 and 2024 the Indian-born population grew by nearly 1.4 million and the Chinese-born by about 815,000, while the Mexican-born population fell by almost 567,000, the largest absolute decline of any group, even though it ticked up slightly in the most recent year.

That shift reflects wider global change. Rising incomes and falling birth rates in Mexico have reduced emigration pressure, while growth in India and the demographic pressures set out in our China population data have reshaped the flows, alongside US demand for skilled workers in technology and healthcare. Among immigrants who arrived within the last year, the top origins as of 2024 were Mexico, India and Venezuela, a mix of long-established and much newer migration routes.

The diversification runs deeper than the top few countries. Immigrants from Africa, though still a small share of the total at under 3 million, have roughly doubled since 2010, the fastest proportional growth of any region, with Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt among the largest sources. South American arrivals, led by Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil, have also grown steeply. The overall effect is that the US immigrant population today draws on a far wider set of countries than at any previous point in its history.

Mexico leads; India is rising fastest: about 11.1 million US immigrants were born in Mexico, ahead of India and China, though the Indian-born population has grown fastest since 2010 while the Mexican-born population has declined.

Asia gains; Mexico declines: between 2010 and 2024 the immigrant population born in Asia grew substantially while the Mexican-born population fell, reshaping the composition of US immigration.

What Is the Legal Status of US Immigrants?

The foreign-born population is far from uniform in status. About 46 percent, nearly half, are naturalised US citizens, a share that has been rising for decades, while roughly a quarter hold lawful permanent residence, commonly called a green card. Smaller groups hold temporary visas for work, study or humanitarian protection, and the remainder are unauthorised.

Estimates put the unauthorised population near 14 million in 2023, the highest recorded and about 27 percent of all foreign-born residents, though 2025 and 2026 figures are among the most disputed numbers in the entire dataset. It is worth noting how long-settled much of the population is: as of 2024, about 41 percent of all US immigrants had arrived before the year 2000, so a large share have lived in the country for more than a quarter of a century.

Naturalisation is the pathway that links these categories, and its pace has become a data point in its own right. Lawful permanent residents can generally apply for citizenship after three to five years, and in recent years around 800,000 to 900,000 people naturalised annually. USCIS completed about 54 percent fewer naturalisation applications in January 2026 than a year earlier, a sharp slowdown that will show up in future status breakdowns even if the underlying population does not change.

Nearly half are naturalised citizens: about 46 percent of the US foreign-born population holds US citizenship, with lawful permanent residents, temporary visa holders and an unauthorised population making up the rest.

Which US States Have the Most Immigrants?

California has the largest immigrant population at roughly 10.5 million, about a fifth of the national total, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey. Together the top five states account for well over half of all US immigrants, a concentration that has held for decades even as the geography has slowly broadened.

Measured by share rather than absolute numbers the picture shifts. Roughly a quarter of California residents are foreign born, and in Miami the figure passes half, the highest of any large US city. States such as North Dakota, Tennessee and Iowa, by contrast, have immigrant populations under 6 percent, though several have seen their foreign-born numbers double or triple since 2010 from a very low base. The result is a country where the lived experience of immigration varies enormously from one state to the next.

The fastest change is happening elsewhere. Florida and Texas gained the largest absolute number of new immigrants between 2010 and 2024, while several states with historically small immigrant populations have seen much larger relative growth. Settlement is overwhelmingly urban and clusters in a handful of metropolitan areas, the same hubs that dominate our US metro area rankings and, at a global scale, the megacities covered in our largest city in the world report.

California alone holds a fifth: roughly 10.5 million immigrants live in California, ahead of Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey, with the top five states accounting for more than half the national total.

How Many US Workers Are Immigrants?

Immigrants made up about 19 percent of the US labor force in 2026, down from 20 percent, after the foreign-born workforce shrank by more than 750,000 people in the first half of 2025 alone. Because the native-born working-age population is barely growing, that decline translates almost directly into slower labor-force growth overall.

The impact is uneven across the economy, because immigrant workers are heavily concentrated in particular industries. They account for a disproportionate share of employment in construction, agriculture, food processing, healthcare support and hospitality, and also in high-skilled technology roles, where the H-1B route feeds firms among the biggest companies in the world and the research base behind our global AI statistics. A tightening supply in those sectors has visible effects on wages, costs and output that broader averages tend to hide.

Immigrants also account for a disproportionate share of business formation and patenting in the United States, and a large share of graduate students in science and engineering. Economists broadly agree that immigration raises total output, though they continue to debate its distributional effects, particularly on wages for workers without a high school education, and its net fiscal impact, which varies substantially with the age, education and status of arrivals. Those debates sit outside the scope of a statistics report, but they explain why the same figures are cited in support of very different conclusions.

Concentrated in construction and farming: immigrants make up a far higher share of workers in agriculture, construction and food processing than in the workforce as a whole, so changes in migration hit those industries first.

What Do Enforcement and Court Data Show?

The administrative side of the system is under visible strain. ICE detention reached an all-time single-day record of 73,400 people in mid-January 2026, and removals rose substantially through 2025, though the exact totals vary between agency releases. Naturalisation processing moved the other way: USCIS completed about 54 percent fewer naturalisation applications in January 2026 than twelve months earlier.

The immigration courts show the accumulated pressure most clearly. Pending cases passed 3.3 million as of March 2026, a backlog that has grown roughly tenfold since 2016 and that leaves many applicants waiting years for a hearing.

The backlog matters beyond the courtroom because it shapes the numbers elsewhere. People awaiting a hearing are generally present in the country and counted in the foreign-born population, often with work authorisation, so the pace of case processing affects labor-force figures as much as legal outcomes. With roughly 700 immigration judges handling more than 3 million pending cases, the arithmetic alone means the backlog cannot clear quickly under current capacity. Refugee admissions have also changed sharply: more than 100,000 refugees were resettled in fiscal 2024, the most in three decades, against slightly more than 38,000 in fiscal 2025 following a lower ceiling.

Past 3.3 million pending cases: the US immigration court backlog has grown roughly tenfold since 2016, reaching more than 3.3 million pending cases by March 2026.

How Does US Immigration Compare Internationally?

The United States hosts more immigrants than any other country by a wide margin, with about 51.9 million people, more than the next four destinations combined. Germany follows at roughly 17 million, then Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Kingdom. In absolute terms, no country comes close.

By share of population, though, the US ranks well down the list. Its roughly 15 percent is below Canada at about 22 percent, Australia at around 30 percent, and far below Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates, where close to 75 percent of residents are foreign born, or Saudi Arabia at about 40 percent. The pattern reflects different economic models and migration systems, from settlement-and-citizenship countries to temporary labor states, and it connects to the wealth gaps set out in our GDP per capita by country and richest countries rankings, since income differences remain the strongest single driver of migration worldwide.

The US hosts more than the next four combined: with about 51.9 million immigrants, the United States is by far the largest destination in absolute terms, though it ranks well below Canada, Australia and the Gulf states by share of population.

What Is the Outlook for US Immigration?

The near-term picture depends heavily on policy, which makes forecasting unusually difficult. The Census Bureau projection of about 321,000 net migrants for 2026 assumes current conditions persist and is held constant for 2027 and 2028, an explicitly cautious assumption rather than a prediction. The CBO, working from different premises, projects higher figures, and any change in enforcement, parole programmes or visa policy could move the numbers substantially in either direction.

What is less uncertain is the demographic arithmetic. US fertility is well below replacement level and the native-born working-age population is close to flat, so without net migration the country would face population decline within a couple of decades, the trajectory already visible in Japan, Korea and much of Europe. That is why immigration levels feed directly into long-run projections of the labor force, the tax base, entitlement funding and economic growth, and why the numbers in this report are watched as closely by economists as by policymakers.

For anyone tracking this topic through 2026 and beyond, three releases matter most: the Census Bureau annual population estimates each December and January, which set the headline net-migration figure; the American Community Survey, which provides the detailed breakdowns by origin, state and status; and the monthly Current Population Survey, which gives the earliest read on the foreign-born labor force. Reading those together, rather than relying on any single release, is the only reliable way to follow a situation changing this quickly.

US Immigration in Numbers

A handful of figures capture US immigration in 2026. About 51.9 million foreign-born people live in the United States, roughly 15 percent of the population, down from a record 53.3 million in January 2025. Net migration is projected at 321,000, about 90 percent below its 2023 peak. Mexico remains the largest origin at 11.1 million, immigrants are 19 percent of the labor force, and the court backlog exceeds 3.3 million cases. Taken together, these numbers describe a system that expanded faster than at any point in modern history and then contracted just as sharply, leaving both the data and its interpretation unusually contested.

Together these figures show immigration in the United States at its most volatile point in decades, with a record population reached and then reversed inside a single year. Because the underlying estimates differ so much between agencies, the most useful approach is the one taken throughout this report: cite the source, give the range, and treat any single headline number with appropriate caution.

Frequently Asked Questions: US Immigration