This timeline shows how many immigrants came to the United States from each country or region. It extends from 1820, when the U.S. government began collecting data, to 2006, the last year for which information was available. The numbers are courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics.
To show the impact that immigrants have had on the U.S., we included a “proportional” option. It displays the number of immigrants each year per million people in the United States that year.
For space reasons, we chose to show only countries and regions from which more than one million immigrants have arrived. Some countries have been combined into regions because they were once united (Austria and Hungary, Sweden and Norway) or because of cultural or geographical similarities (Central America and the Caribbean).
Timeline produced by Amy Crawford and Ahmed Shihab-Eldin.