America is a nation of immigration | Political Reality | S01E04

The graph on total immigration numbers vs. percentage of the US population is from the Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

Evidence that the percentage of immigrants in the US peaked recently, but is in the ballpark of an earlier wave is from Pew Research.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findings-about-us-immigrants/sr_25-08-21_immigrants-in-the-us_1/
(n.b. I may have said in the episode that this was in 2023 or 24, when actually it was January 2025, more recent than I realized. I don’t know if that matters!)

In the episode I mentioned the Deportation Data Project.
https://deportationdata.org

You can explore their ICE data here.
https://deportationdata.org/data/processed/ice

And read more about the FOIA requests/challenges around getting this data here.
https://deportationdata.org/docs/ice.html#faq

I also specifically mentioned my favorite public opinion dataset (which I will likely reference a lot in this show!), which is the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset.
https://electionstudies.org

I also recently wrote about some of these trends in an article for The Preamble, a digital magazine about US politics from Sharon McMahon.
https://thepreamble.com/p/eight-charts-that-explain-the-immigration
https://thepreamble.com
https://sharonmcmahon.com

You’ll see some of the charts we talked about in the episode as well as links to other sources, particularly various additional Pew Research data, in the article.

More data will be available on https://politicalrealitypodcast.com