Does the United States have the highest number of immigrants as Marco Rubio says?

The United States leads the world in terms of the number of immigrants it allows to enter the country, says U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.

"We have a legal immigration system in America that accepts 1 million people a year, legally," Rubio said at the National Review Forum May 1. "No other country in the world even comes close to that."

Is Rubio correct that no other country in the world comes close to the number of legal immigrants that come to the United States each year?

Legal immigration

First, some background on Rubio’s efforts to change the nation’s immigration laws.

Rubio and seven other senators crafted bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate in 2013. The bill included a pathway to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants, albeit one with significant hurdles. But the House wasn’t interested in that approach, and after that died, Rubio said he still favored changing immigration law through piecemeal bills.

We sent Rubio’s spokesman a summary of our findings, and he noted a similar fact-check we did in 2012. Immigration has been such a hot topic in the 2016 presidential race, though, that we decided to take a fresh look at the numbers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security keeps track of the number of new legal permanent residents a year, and in 2013 (the most recent year available) it was 990,553.

Of this number, about 46 percent were new arrivals, and about 54 percent were people already in the United States whose status was upgraded to "permanent."

For data on the number of new immigrants in the United States compared with other countries, we turned to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Formed in 1961, OECD collects data on a wide range of topics, including immigration.

Featured Fact-check

Instagram posts

stated on March 21, 2024 in an Instagram post

Video shows legislators “dancing in Congress” while the border is “overrun.”

We looked at the data in two ways for 2013: first, the sheer number of legal immigrants and secondly, the number of new immigrants as a percentage of the population.

Comparing the sheer number of new legal immigrants in the United States with other countries is complicated because countries use different requirements to define an "immigrant" for their statistics.

For example, Germany -- which has had big increases in immigration in recent years -- uses a broad definition of an immigrant that catches a lot of short-term flows. That means that the figures reported by Germany are not directly comparable with those in the United States, which only counts permanent immigration, said Thomas Liebig, an OECD immigration expert.

OECD standardizes the data from various countries to make them comparable with those in the United States. That process aims to count only permanent residents and exclude other categories such as seasonal workers or students.

The OECD is in the process of standardizing the data for 2013, but the United States will be in the top spot for the sheer number of immigrants with nearly one million immigrants. Provisional figures by OECD show that Germany had 466,000 while the United Kingdom had 291,000.

In per capita rates,the United States place 19th out of 24 countries. That means that the United States received fewer immigrants per capita in 2012-13 compared with several European countries, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

"While the United States remains the largest destination of new permanent immigration in the OECD in absolute terms, inflows in per capita terms (i.e. relative to its population) are less than half of the OECD average," Liebig told PolitiFact.

Several other immigration experts pointed to the OECD data but also offered additional caveats. People moving within the European Union will not necessarily get citizenship in their new country, while those in the United States given greencards can become citizens after three or five years, said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for low levels of immigration.

"It is correct to say that in total number of people admitted with what I would call a ‘clear path to citizenship,’ the United States vastly exceeds all other countries. And these absolute numbers matter a great deal. One million people is still a lot of folks, whether they are 1 percent or 3 percent of a nation's population," he said. "As a percentage of the population, the number who can get citizenship is still very high in the United States, but some countries are higher. What is very generous about the United States is that we give so many folks with no historical or ethnic tie to the United States a clear path to citizenship."

Our ruling

Rubio said, "We have a legal immigration system in America that accepts one million people a year, legally. No other country in the world even comes close to that."

The United States accepted just under 1 million people in 2013, the most recent numbers available. As a percentage of population, though, the United States ranked 19th out of 24 countries in 2013. Still, Rubio is correct that the overall figure puts the United States ahead of other countries. We rate this claim Mostly True.