Immigration Drives US Population Growth To The Highest Rate In 23 Years As Residents Pass 340 Million

The Census Bureau has revised its method of calculating immigration, acknowledging previous undercounts. The updated 2023 figures now show 2.3 million more than initially reported. The last method failed to account for many humanitarian-based immigrants lacking stable housing, particularly those seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border.

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

According to the annual population estimates, this year's almost 1 per cent growth rate was the highest 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 as per the annual population estimates.

Immigration increased by almost 2.8 million this year, partly because of a new counting method that added people 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 519000 between 2023 and 2024, an improvement over the historic low of 1,46,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.

Immigration had a meaningful impact nationally and for individual states, accounting for all the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out of state or deaths outpacing births. William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.

"While some of the surges 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 areas combined. Texas added the most people, 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation's fastest growth rate, at 2.2 percent.

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.

After declining this decade, California and New York added people in 2024, growing by 232,570 people and 129,881 people, respectively, primarily because of immigration. Still, the large number of people moving South this decade has caused the US population centre to turn sharply south after drifting southwesterly for many decades in a demographic shock to the evolving settlement pattern of the United States," said Alex Zakrewasky, an urban planner in New Jersey who calculates the population centre each year.

The number of children in the United States dropped from 73.3 million in 2023 to 73.1 million in 2024. 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 Insitute a Washington based research organization 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 challenging part of the annual US population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before the 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's estimate of 3.3 million people. With the revised method, the Census Bureau calculates last year's immigration figures 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."

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