Joyce Key Hahn

People who identified their ancestry as French could have been born abroad or in the United States; similarly, the foreign-born from France may include individuals who do not have French ancestry. According to ACS data on the foreign-born from France, which come from answers to questions about citizenship and place of birth, there were 182,467 foreign-born from France in the United States in 2022. “Foreign-born” refers to anyone who was not a U.S. citizen at birth.

While the foreign-born population was roughly split between those entering Puerto Rico before 2000 (54.5%) and those entering in 2000 or later (45.5%), there were wide variations by region and subregion of birth. Around 75% of the immigrants who arrived before 2000 were born in the Caribbean (Figure 4). However, net flows from this subregion fell in more recent periods of entry.

The number of foreign-born people in the United States rose by more than 5 million over 10 years to 45.3 million or 13.7% of the nation's population, according to the 2018-2022 5-year American Community Survey, or ACS, estimates. We compare estimates for the 2018-2022 period to the 5-year ACS period a decade earlier (2008-2012) when there were 39.8 million foreign-born people, or 12.9% of the population.