Overview
The Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, a publication of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is a collection of tables from various years that provides data on foreign nationals who, during a given fiscal year, fall into one of the following categories:
- Were granted lawful permanent residence (i.e., admitted as immigrants or became legal permanent residents)
- Were admitted into the United States on a temporary basis (e.g., tourists, students or workers)
- Applied for asylum or were admitted with refugee status; or
- Were naturalized
The Yearbook also presents data on immigration enforcement actions, including alien apprehensions, removals and returns.*
*This description is a paraphrased version of the description on the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics main website.
Available data file formats
Excel and PDF.
Accessibility
This is an open data source that is for public use.
Yearbook of Immigration Statistics
How to retrieve data by example
Scenario
Suppose you are trying to find information on foreign adoptions in the United States. Specifically, you would like to obtain the the number of foreign adoptions by country, and maybe some other characteristics, for the year 2016. You would like the raw data in Excel format.
Step-by-step
- First, go to the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics website and under Available Yearbooks click on the 2016 yearbook link that says Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2016.
- This takes you to a page that contains links to all of the available tables for the 2016 fiscal year. Scroll down looking at the different tables and click on the link to Table 12 with the description Immigrant Orphans Adopted By U.S. Citizens By Sex, Age, And Region And Country Of Birth: Fiscal Year 2016.
- The page you are now looking at contains two tables: one based on sex, age and region of birth, and one based on sex, age and country of birth.
- To obtain the data from the tables, return to the previous page. The top of the page indicates the entire Yearbook and corresponding Excel files can be found at the bottom of the page. Scroll to the bottom and you will see this table, titled Attachments.
- Click on Lawful Permanent Residents 2016 (Tables 1-12) and a .zip file will be downloaded to your computer. Once you locate the file on your computer, open the .zip file and click on the Excel file that pertains to Table 12.
- You should now have access to Table 12 in the format of an Excel file, and should look similar to the image below.
- To obtain the PDF, simply click on the PDF link at the top of the Attachments table and view the PDF. Looking at the table of contents, Table 12 is located on page 35 and should look like the image below.
Whether in an Excel file or PDF, you should now have access to the raw data on the number of foreign adoptions in the United States for the year 2016.
Be sure to consult with the source website on how to properly cite your data. For this scenario, the citation was obtained from the PDF document and would be:
United States. Department of Homeland Security. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2016. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, 2017.