Most of the 1 million Venezuelans in the United States arrived within the past decade |
In 2024, the most recent year for which we have data, an estimated 1 million immigrants from Venezuela lived in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, these Venezuelans constitute about 2% of the total immigrant population.
We are demographers – social scientists who specialize in understanding the changing U.S. population, including changes due to immigration.
With all the coverage of Venezuela in the U.S. news right now, we were interested in looking at the data to learn about this group of immigrants and where they live.
Notably, Venezuelan immigrants have lived in the United States for barely 10 years on average, considerably less than the nearly 23-year average for the total immigrant population. More than half of Venezuelan immigrants report arriving in the U.S. in the past five years, coinciding with the highly disputed 2018 Venezuelan election in which Nicolas Maduro retained power.
Data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics illuminates this difference, pointing to recent dramatic growth in the Venezuelan population in the U.S. Annual counts of Venezuelans obtaining legal permanent residence permits, commonly called green cards, have more than doubled since 2018. Moreover, the number of........