Mass Immigration by the Numbers

Sources

1. Population: 1990 Census and January 2025 CPS (CIS analysis), as detailed in the foreign-born chart sources. The increase is in foreign-born residents, not a count of arrivals or U.S.-born descendants. Home values: Census historical home values for 1990, and ACS 2024 B25077. The housing ratio uses ACS 2024 B19013 household income. Historical housing coverage and income surveys differ; comparisons are approximate. Income: Census CPS ASEC, historical nominal 1990 income and Income in the United States: 2025. Value and income changes are nominal, not inflation-adjusted. Rent: 1990 Census gross rent and 2024 ACS 1-year B25064; a comparable 2025 endpoint has not been verified. Metro comparison: median of the 2024 home-value-to-household-income ratios in the existing 109-metro panel: under 5% foreign-born (4 metros), 5% to under 10% (44), and 25% or more (8). These are home values, not sale prices. The geographic association does not isolate an immigration effect on housing costs.
2. State Department, Proclamation 10998 guidance: 19 full restrictions, 19 B/F/M/J plus immigrant restrictions, and Turkmenistan immigrant-only restrictions. Exceptions include LPRs, qualifying dual nationals and certain official or national-interest cases. Visas valid on January 1, 2026 are outside this suspension. Palestinian Authority travel documents are separately covered.State Department, August 28 update: the separate 75-country immigrant-visa issuance pause ended August 21, 2026 under a court order. The former-pause layer is historical, not an active restriction. Checked September 29, 2026.
3. Sources: Migration Policy Institute; Census Bureau Historical Data; DHS Yearbook
4. Sources: USCIS, Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers, 2025 annual report to Congress (April 2026), Appendix Table 1a for country of birth, the 406,348 approvals, the 28%-72% split between initial and continuing employment, and the $133,000 median. Wage levels are the Department of Homeland Security's own figures in the weighted-selection final rule, 90 Fed. Reg. 60864 (Dec. 29, 2025), Table 12, a five-year average of cap-subject petition receipts for 2020 through 2024. The Labor Department sets Level I at about the 17th percentile of the local wage for the occupation, Level II at the 34th, Level III at the 50th, and Level IV at the 67th. Wage levels classify prevailing-wage benchmarks, not actual pay; the rule explicitly notes that offered wages may exceed the LCA wage level (page 60946). DHS methodology and tables.
5. Approval series: USCIS Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers, FY2020 Table 1b (restated FY2016–2020 counts), FY2021, FY2023, FY2024, and FY2025 reports. FY2025 total: 406,348. Counts include initial and continuing employment and are not unique workers or arrivals. No FY2026 forecast is shown. The 85,000 reference is the 65,000 regular cap plus 20,000 U.S. advanced-degree exemption, not a cap on all approvals. Resident population: FWD.us policy brief dated January 27, 2025, estimating up to 730,000 holders and 550,000 dependents (nearly 1.3 million combined). USCIS FY2025 report · Population estimate
6. National benchmarks: Census historical median home values (1970 and 1990); 1970 CPS household income; 1990 CPS household income; and ACS 2024 B25077 home value and B19013 household income. Historical values cover specified owner-occupied single-family homes; ACS covers all owner-occupied homes. Income survey methods also differ, so historical comparisons are approximate. By metro: ACS 2024 median home value divided by median household income, summarized across the 109-metro panel. This is not a mortgage-payment burden.
7. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census of Housing, homeownership rates, 1900-2020, with the 2024 rate from the Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey.
8. Bubbles show foreign-born population for the 30 U.S. metro areas with the largest foreign-born populations, U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024 1-year: each metro's foreign-born share applied to its population, one basis for all thirty. Those 30 metros hold about 81% of the foreign-born counted across the 109 metro areas over 500,000 people. The national total and its growth from 1990 to January 2025 are from the U.S. Census decennial counts, ACS, and CIS analysis of the Current Population Survey. The changing first- and second-generation counter uses Census CPS ASEC annual generation counts, 2005–2024. It includes all arrival years and U.S.-born children of any age, excluding later generations with two U.S.-born parents. For 1990 and 2000, Pew historical generation shares are multiplied by C51 population denominators; intervening years through 2004 are linearly interpolated. The 2025 value is our trend estimate, extending the 2021–2024 mean annual change by one year, not a published Census or MPI observation. Survey coverage and weighting change over time; modeled years are identified in the tooltip. The separate MPI benchmark is not spliced into this Census series. See CLAIMS C105 for the reproducible calculation and limitations. Metro bubbles measure foreign-born residents only. The three largest countries of birth in each popup are ACS 2024 table B05006, via the Census Reporter API: one-year for 26 of the 30 metro areas, the same vintage as the bubble counts, and the 2024 five-year table for Austin, San Antonio, Providence and Fresno, which do not publish country-level place of birth at one-year. The table's regional roll-ups ("Caribbean", "Eastern Africa") and its residual "Other" rows are excluded before ranking, so every entry is a country.
9. Unauthorized resident population, not annual entries or border encounters. The 1980 range comes from Census testimony, page 39. The 1990–2015 observations use Pew’s August 2025 historical table, All countries row: Pew historical estimates. January 2020: 10.51 million, rounded to 10.5 million, from DHS’s April 2024 report, Table 1: DHS report (PDF mirror). January 2025: 15.8 million, CIS’s preliminary estimate adjusted for undercount: CIS report, also reproduced by DHS in August 2025. These January estimates use different methods from Pew; they are not annual averages or a single comparable series. The 2020 share uses C51’s annual population denominator. The 2025 share uses Census’s January 1 projection of 341,145,670: Census population projection. Historical population denominators follow CLAIMS C51; 2005 uses 295.5 million from BTS’s Census population table. Foreign-born population: Census decennial census and ACS; January 2025 uses CIS analysis of the CPS.
10. Census Bureau, January 2026: rounded net international migration estimates of 2.7 million (2024), 1.3 million (2025), and a projection of about 321,000 (2026). Estimate years run July–June. These are migration flows into minus out of the resident population, not visa issuances or border encounters.Census methodology explains the periods and revisions.CBO separately projected about 570,000 for calendar 2026; that projection uses a different period and method and is not plotted here.
11. Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023, for the distribution of English ability among immigrant adults and the 22.3 million total; KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants (2023) for the reported difficulties, insurance coverage, and self-reported health. Both series count adults aged 18 and over born outside the United States.
12. Sources: Council of Europe CEFR descriptors; USCIS Reading & Writing Vocabulary Lists; national immigration authorities
13. Population, 1990: U.S. Census Bureau, County Population Estimates 1990-2000 (CO-99-8), the April 1 1990 census base, summed over the counties of each metro's 2023 OMB delineation so both years sit on the same footprint. Population and foreign-born, 2024: American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, at metropolitan statistical area level. Foreign-born, 1990: U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper POP-twps0029 (Gibson and Lennon, 1999), Table 16, "Nativity of the Population for Metropolitan Areas With 500,000 or More Population: 1990", summed over the 1990 metro areas that make up the modern footprint. The native-born column is the difference between the two measured series, which makes it exactly the change in the native-born population: total 2024 less foreign-born 2024, against the same subtraction for 1990. Census counts as native anyone born in the United States, Puerto Rico or a U.S. Island Area, or abroad to a U.S.-citizen parent. Counties that were rural in 1990 sit outside the 1990 nativity table, which affects Atlanta (8.1% of its modern population), Phoenix (5.2%), Minneapolis (4.5%) and San Jose (2.4%, San Benito County) and slightly overstates their foreign-born growth. Median home price to income is ACS 2024 1-year median home value divided by median household income, the same basis as the metro scatter; it runs about 1.2 points below the national median SALE-price ratio and is not comparable to it.
14. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year (home value, income, rent, foreign-born); Census population estimates (1990, 2025). Home price-to-income here is the ACS home-VALUE basis, which runs about 1.2 points below the median sale-price basis used for the national figure and is not comparable to it. Two of the 111 metros over 500,000 people are absent: Killeen, TX and Springfield, MO, which lack matched home-value and income data in this release, leaving 109.