Charts
Mass Immigration by the Numbers
The charts below track what mass immigration has done to housing, wages, and the composition of the population since 1990, drawn from Census, BLS, and other government data.
15.8%
Foreign-born share, 2025
doubled from 7.9% in 1990
~32M
Foreign-born people brought to the US since 1990
about 64% of all foreign-born live in just 20 metros
5.6x
Home price-to-income, 2024
compared to 3x in 1990
~70%
Real rent rise in the immigration metros
Los Angeles to Washington, after inflation; the low-immigration interior rose about 20%
399K
H-1B approvals, 2024
far above the 65,000-a-year cap on new visas set in 1990
The pattern
Two waves, and one pause
America has run the same experiment twice. It opened the doors from 1890 to 1924, cut them by about 80%, then reopened them in 1990. The foreign-born share has tripled since.
The scale
Thirty-two million people, twenty cities
Since 1990 the country added roughly 32 million foreign-born residents. About 64% of all foreign-born now live in just 20 metropolitan areas, which grew far faster than the rest of the country.
Housing
Priced out of a home
A median home cost about two years of household income for decades. It costs 5.6 now, and across the 54 largest metros the ratio rises with a metro's immigrant share.
Jobs and wages
A bigger labor pool, weaker leverage
The American worker now competes in a labor pool that grew from about 70 million in 1960 to about 168 million in 2024, and nearly one in five workers was born abroad. A larger pool gives employers more room to hold wages down.
The H-1B pipeline
The visa that undercuts the wage
H-1B approvals reached 399,000 in 2024, far above the 65,000 cap on new visas the program was created with in 1990. The visas concentrate in a small set of outsourcing firms and a few origin countries, and most are certified below the local going wage.
Family formation
Fewer births where housing costs most
Fertility is lowest in the high-cost metros where post-1990 immigration concentrated. Each of the five largest immigration metros sits below the replacement rate, and once higher immigrant fertility is set aside, the native-born rate falls further.
Assimilation
The English gap
English proficiency predicts how a worker fares, and large, concentrated arrivals slow the shift to English. Workers with limited English earn less and are far likelier to live in poverty.
Fraud and accountability
Where oversight fails
Immigration fraud, from marriage and asylum claims to benefit and document schemes, has surfaced across the country. The cost lands on taxpayers, and it often goes uninvestigated where officials fear the accusation of bias more than the fraud.
The proof
What the pause built
Homeownership rose only during the decades immigration was low, climbing 21 points to a peak by 1980. Once the 1990 Act reopened the inflow, it fell back toward the low 60s. The one intervention that worked is on the record.
The fix
Back to a sustainable level
The Center proposes cutting annual admissions by at least half, toward the pre-1965 level the country sustained for decades, and ending illegal entry in practice rather than on paper.
The full analysis is in the articles
Every figure on this page is drawn from Census, BLS, and other government data, and each article works through one part of it in detail.