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What you should know about this indicator

The way immigrants were counted by the US government has changed over time.

  • 1820–1867: the figures count every foreign national who arrived by ship at a US seaport, including temporary visitors and people passing through, because no distinction was yet made between immigrants and other travelers.
  • 1868–1891: the figures count only foreign nationals who arrived intending to settle, because the government now separated genuine immigrants from temporary visitors and stopped counting the visitors.
  • 1892 onward: the figures count only foreign nationals formally inspected and admitted for permanent residence, so people who arrived but were turned away at inspection are no longer included, and the count reflects a legal admission rather than a simple arrival.
  • Immigrants entering overland from Canada and Mexico were not fully counted until 1908.
Source
US Department of Homeland Security (2026) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 22, 2026
Next expected update
July 2027
Date range
1820–2024
Unit
people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

US Department of Homeland Security – Yearbook of Immigration Statistics

The 2024 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a collection of tables about immigration for the fiscal year.

Retrieved on
July 22, 2026
Retrieved from
https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2024/table1
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United States. Department of Homeland Security. 2024 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security Statistics, 2026.

The 2024 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics is a collection of tables about immigration for the fiscal year.

Retrieved on
July 22, 2026
Retrieved from
https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2024/table1
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United States. Department of Homeland Security. 2024 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security Statistics, 2026.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: People granted permanent residency in the United States”, part of the following publication: Fiona Spooner, Tuna Acisu, Hannah Ritchie, Simon van Teutem, Sophia Mersmann, Marwa Boukarim, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Marcel Gerber, and Max Roser (2022) - “Migration”. Data adapted from US Department of Homeland Security. Retrieved from https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states [online resource]

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

US Department of Homeland Security (2026) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

US Department of Homeland Security (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “People granted permanent residency in the United States” [dataset]. US Department of Homeland Security, “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics” [original data]. Retrieved July 23, 2026 from https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://data-add-longrun-us.owid.pages.dev/grapher/people-obtaining-legal-permanent-resident-status-in-the-united-states.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear