Since the beginning of the 21st century the movement of people around the globe has picked up. Factors such as globalization, wars and natural disasters have spurred an increase in the number of people emigrating or finding themselves forced into fleeing their homes and becoming refugees, looking for a new home. Resistance to newcomers is on the rise in many places and tensions run high when the topic of immigration comes up in public discourse. This set of circumstances made us wonder about the actual numbers of foreign-born people residing in the United States.

Today’s market size is the number of foreign-born people living in the United States in 2000 and in 2015. In the year 2000 foreign-born residents made up 12.4 percent of the U.S. population and in 2015 they accounted for 13.5 percent of all residents. The graph shows how the number of foreign-born persons in the population has trended over the last 165 years.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2000 and 2015
Market size: 31.1 and 43.3 million respectively
Source: Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Table 1. Nativity of the Population and Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 2000,” Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1985 to 2000, U.S. Census Bureau, February 2006, available here; “Table 1.1 – Population by Sex, Age, Nativity, and U.S. Citizenship Status, 2010,” from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, March 2010 Detailed Tables, available here, and “Table 2. Projections of the Population by Nativity for the United States: 2015 to 2060,” from the Census Bureau’s Population Project report titled 2014 National Population Projections: Summary Tables, available here.