Tag Archives: visa numbers

US Visa & Immigration Statistics For 2008

The US Immigration Statistics office has released figured about US non-resident immigrantion (i.e. non-immigrants) in 2008.

There are some interesting results such as India’s declining share of the H-1B visas and Mexico being the No. 1 LEGAL immigrant country to the US among others. Both of these main points of course are contrary to what you hear from politicians and much of the media 🙂

Top 6 Non-Immigrant Countries
Mexico 440,099 visas
India 425,826 visas
Japan 257,401 visas
South Korea 216,648 visas
Britain 216,280 visas
China 163,433 visas

Top 5 Countries Citizens Who Became US Citizens (represents over 40% of new US citizens)
Mexico (12%)
India (12%)
Japan (7%)
South Korea (5.9%)
UK (5.9%)

Top 5 F-1 Visas (Student) Countries

South Korea (15%)
China (11%)
India (9.9%)
Japan (6.8%)
Mexico (6.3%)

Notable Changes From 2007 to 2008 US Visa Admissions
China (19% visa increase)
Mexico (16% visa increase)
India (5.6% visa increase)
UK (4.4% visa decrease)
Japan (4.3% visa decrease)

There are some interesting results in all of this and will interesting to compare this year to 2009 especially in the light of many professional workers and others not being hired like with the lack of quota filling at this stage for the H-1B visa.