Immigration drives US population growth to highest rate in 23 years

AP:

Immigration in 2024 drove US population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the US Census Bureau said Thursday.

The one per cent growth rate this year was the highest it has been since 2001, and it was a marked contrast to the record low of 0.2 per cent set in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel to the United States, according to the annual population estimates.

Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84 per cent of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase between 2023 and 2024.

Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by almost 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which was an improvement over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.

Immigration had a meaningful impact not only nationally but also for individual states, accounting for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out-of-state or from deaths outpacing births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.

“While some of the surge may be attributed to border crossings of asylees and humanitarian migrants in an unusual year, these numbers also show how immigration can be an important contributor to population gains in a large swath of the nation that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or declines,” Frey said.

As it has been throughout the 2020s, the South was the fastest growing region in the United States in 2024, adding more new residents — 1.8 million people — than all the other regions combined. Texas added the most people at 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation’s fastest growth rate at 2.2 per cent.

Three states – Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia – lost population this year, though by tiny amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.

In 2024, there was an easing up in the number of people moving out of coastal urban states like California and New York and into the Sunbelt growth powerhouses like Florida and Texas compared with the peak pandemic years, Frey said.

Still, the large number of people moving South this decade has caused the US population centre to turn sharply south after drifting southwesterly for several decades in “a demographic shock to the evolving settlement pattern of the United States,” said Alex Zakrewsky, an urban planner in New Jersey who calculates the population centre each year.

The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the US. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organisation, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.

Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual US population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. With the revised method, last year’s immigration figures are now recalculated by the Census Bureau at almost 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.

Because the Census Bureau survey used to estimate foreign-born immigration only captured people living in households with addresses, it overlooked large numbers of immigrants who had come for humanitarian reasons this decade since it often takes them a few years to get a stable home, said Jennifer Van Hook, a Penn State demographer who worked on the change at the bureau.

“What has happened over time is that immigration has changed,” Van Hook said. “You have numbers of people coming in who are claiming asylum and being processed at the US-Mexico border from across the globe.”

The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.