As of 2023, approximately 14.3% of people living in the United States were born outside the country. 49% were naturalized U.S. citizens, so 51% of the foreign-born population were not U.S. citizens as of 2022 (this includes lawful permanent residents, legal temporary residents, and illegal aliens). Applying this percentage to the 2023 foreign-born population estimate, around 7.3% of the total U.S. population were non-citizens at that time. By contrast, 15.3% of prisoners in federal prison in January 2025 were citizens of a foreign country — 110% higher than their share of the U.S. population. These numbers don’t differentiate between legal and illegal aliens. Part of this high rate may be due to the types of crimes that the federal government covers. For example, 4.6% of the prisoners are there for immigration offenses. Subtracting 4.6% from 15.3% will give 10.7%, which is still 46.6% higher than their share of the U.S. population. But some of the immigrations may involve fraud by U.S. citizens.
While 8.0% of the people in federal prison are Mexican citizens, the Migration Policy Institute says that about 3.3% of people living in the U.S. are Mexican citizens. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t have the citizenship numbers broken down by type of crime.
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