Promised land no more? Data shows European migration to US declining

Today Europeans account for around 10% of the 46.2 million immigrants living in the US, according to data reported by the Migration Policy Institute.

The European expat community in America has slightly shrunk since the 1980s, with a few fluctuations over the years: From over 5.1 million people to just over 4.7 million in 2022.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vast majority of arrivals came from eastern Europe, while the share of western and southern Europeans began to steadily decline in the early 2000s.

Forty-one per cent of all current European migrants in America are immediate relatives of US citizens – while 30% were granted the green card thanks to ’employment-based preferences’.

Most European immigrants are concentrated in the states of New York and California, 15% and 14% respectively.

Eastern Europeans represent 46% of Europeans in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The largest nationality is British (14%), followed by German (11%), Ukrainian (9%), Russian and Polish (8%) and Italian (6%).

The war in Ukraine boosted significantly the Ukrainian population in the country, with 186,000 people estimated to have arrived in the US from the Mexico border or through a humanitarian scheme called Uniting for Ukraine.

In terms of age, European immigrants tend to be significantly older than their foreign counterparts: 54-year-old vs 47-year-old on average for all immigrants.

Today there are 63.3 million European migrants in the world, with 70% of them residing elsewhere in Europe.