Immigration drives U.S. population growth at highest rate in 23 years

Immigration in 2024 propelled U.S. population growth to its fastest pace in 23 years, with the country surpassing 340 million people, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

The growth rate of nearly 1% this year was the highest since 2001, and it contrasted sharply with the record low of 0.2% set in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel in the United States, according to the annual report. population estimates.

This year, immigration increased by nearly 2.8 million people, in part because of a new counting method that adds people admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the country’s increase of 3.3 million people between 2023 and 2024.

Births exceeded deaths in the United States by nearly 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which is an improvement from the historic low of 146,000 in 2021, but still well below the highs of previous decades.

Immigration has had a significant impact not only nationally but also within each state, accounting for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population due to residents leaving the state or deaths exceeding births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.

“While some of this increase can be attributed to border crossings by asylum seekers and humanitarian migrants during an unusual year, these figures also show how immigration can contribute significantly to the he population increase in much of the country, which would otherwise experience slow growth. or decline,” Frey said.

As has been the case 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 other regions united. Texas added the most people with 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the fastest growth rate in the country at 2.2%.

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

In 2024, the number of people leaving coastal urban states like California and New York and Sunbelt growth powers like Florida and Texas has increased compared to the peak years of the pandemic, Frey said.

In fact, California and New York added population in 2024 after a decline during the decade, increasing by 232,570 and 129,881 people, respectively, mainly due to immigration.

Yet the large number of people who moved south during this decade caused an abrupt shift of the American population center southward after drifting southwestward for several decades, “a demographic shock to the evolving settlement pattern of the United States,” said Alex Zakrewsky, an urban planner. in New Jersey which calculates the population center each year.

The number of children in the United States increased from 73.3 million in 2023 to 73.1 million in 2024.

The group of people included in the international migration estimates are those entering the country under humanitarian parole, granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to navigate immigration routes standard due to time constraints or the weakness of their government. U.S. relations The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies between 2021 and 2024.

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

The office’s annual calculation of the number of migrants who entered the United States in the 2020s is far lower than figures cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimates that 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office estimate was 3.3 million people. With the revised method, last year’s immigration numbers are now recalculated by the Census Bureau to almost 2.3 million people, or 1.1 million more people.

Because the Census Bureau survey used to estimate foreign-born immigration covered only people living in households with addresses, it neglected large numbers of immigrants who came for humanitarian reasons this decade, as it often takes them a few years to get stable housing, said Jennifer Van Hook, a Penn State demographer who worked on the change at the office.

“What’s happened over time is immigration has changed,” Van Hook said. “Many people arrive from around the world seeking asylum and being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border. »