Naturalization Trends in the United States

A report from Migration Information Source analyzes the latest naturalization trends.

Naturalization confers citizenship on foreign nationals with legal permanent resident status in the United States. More than 707,000 immigrants naturalized in fiscal year (FY) 2017. This brought the number of naturalized U.S. citizens to nearly 22 million, about half of the overall immigrant population of 44.5 million. From FY 2008 through FY 2017, the annual number of naturalizations has ranged from about 620,000 to slightly more than 1 million, depending on institutional factors such as processing times and backlogs as well as the financial constraints and personal motivations that shape immigrants’ decisions about whether to apply; the annual number of naturalization applications filed has greatly increased since FY 2015, and so too have processing wait times.

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