Over the past two centuries, some 79 million people have come to the United States and obtained legal resident status. They came from Ireland, fleeing the potato famine, in the mid-1800s. Then Germany led the way. Canada was big in the 1920s, and, of course, it’s all about Mexico lately.

Max Galka of the Metrocosm blog took all the data from 1820 to 2013 and created this animated graphic, using different colors for each country as well as brightness to illustrate the total migration at any given time. The brighter the color, the more immigrants.