Immigration has emerged as one of the most contentious issues in America today, with fierce debates over border security, deportation policies, and the economic and social impacts of migration. While much of the public discourse focuses on enforcement and national security, one critical dimension often receives less attention: the demographic consequences of reduced immigration for communities across the United States. As the Trump administration implements stricter immigration policies and expansive deportation efforts, there has been a noticeable decline in immigrant arrivals and an increase in departures.¹

This analysis of the Census Bureau’s newly released annual population estimates contributes to this discussion by examining not only how the recent immigration slowdown has lowered the nation’s overall population growth, but also how it’s led to lower population growth or greater population declines in most states.² This piece shows national and state demographic shifts over the period from July 2024 to June 2025, along with earlier years, and makes the case that lower immigration levels in the future will have negative impacts on demographic change in most parts of the country—even in states with now small immigrant populations.

The new estimates, which revise and extend earlier estimates, also provide an overview of where state populations have shifted over the past several years, with uneven patterns of growth and decline during the COVID-19 pandemic and, later, a population boost from immigration before the recent slowdown. During this period, domestic migration within the U.S. as well as immigration from abroad contributed to demographic shifts across the country. Examining these trends provides insights as to how domestic migration and immigration from abroad will impact future population growth across the nation.

Among the findings:

National population growth declined from 0.96% in 2023-24 to 0.52% in 2024-25. The former year was the highest national growth rate in almost two decades, while the latter, although not as low as the 2020-21 pandemic year growth rate of 0.16%, is among the smallest in the nation’s history.

Net international migration (referred to here as “immigration”) declined from 2.7 million people in 2023-24 to 1.3 million in 2024-25. The slowdown is largely responsible for the nation’s overall decline in population growth between these years. But because natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—remains low, last year’s decreased immigration still accounted for 71% of the nation’s 2024-25 population growth.

During the year 2024-25, 48 states and the District of Columbia registered either lower levels of growth, greater levels of decline, or shift from growth to decline compared to the previous year. In most of these states, reduced 2024-25 immigration accounted for all or much of these declines. California, which ranked fourth in overall population gains for 2023-24, registered a small absolute population decline in 2024-25 due to a drop in immigration from 313,000 to 109,000 people—which, along with low natural increase, could no longer counter the state’s continued domestic out-migration.

Even at low levels, immigration in 2024-25 contributed to population gains in many states that saw losses or only small gains associated with domestic migration and natural increase. During this year, immigration was responsible for all of the growth in 14 states and more than half the growth in another 10. As immigration continues to decline, many of these states could face smaller population gains or even losses in the next year.

Domestic migration continues to shift from the peak pandemic years, when large coastal and Midwest states saw rising out-migration losses to states in the South and Mountain West. In the past two years, that movement has softened. Although rising immigration through 2024 served to augment growth in all regions, future state growth patterns will become more dependent on domestic migration within the U.S. as immigration diminishes.

Drawing from the recently released population estimates, the analysis below examines the sharp population shifts for the nation and states over the past year and shows what recent immigration and domestic migration patterns imply for future demographic shifts across states.

Immigration and the recent drop in national population growth

National population growth has historically responded to wars, disease, economic upheavals, changing childbearing trends, as well as immigration. Figure 1 depicts annual growth rates for the 125-year period from 1900 to 2025. There are some noticeable dips in growth: down to 0.49% in 1918-19 due to the Spanish Flu pandemic, and in the late 1920s and 1930s due to the Great Depression as fertility and immigration declined.

Figure 1 also shows the population growth surge associated with post-World War II prosperity and the baby boom—rising to 2% in 1950, before declining due to uneven economic times and women’s entry into the labor force.

In the 1990s, both immigration and fertility rose again somewhat. Yet the 21st century brought with it the Great Recession and years of subsequent declines in growth, modest immigration in the late 2010s, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought a virtual halt to anything like normal growth, with a rate of 0.16% in 2020-21.

The post-pandemic period saw a gyration of national growth rates: from the 2020-21 historic low to the 2023-24 recent high of 0.96%, before falling again in 2024-25 to a relative low of 0.52% by historical standards.

It is important to view these last few years from both a long- and short-term perspective with respect to the demographic components of change (natural increase and immigration) (see Figure 2). From a long-term perspective, it is clear that natural increase was trending downward well before the pandemic, though it still contributed more to national population gains than immigration. But the pandemic led to a sharp reduction in natural increase due to a rapid rise in deaths and decline in births (see downloadable Table A).

While the annual number of deaths has come down and the number of births has risen since the pandemic, overall natural increase gains (519,000 people in 2024-25) is far lower than it was in the 2000s or earlier, and is generally projected to stay low due to an increasingly aging population.

This places a greater demand on immigration as a contributor to national growth, which clearly happened after the pandemic, when immigration rose sharply to high of 2.7 million people in 2023-24, accounting for 84% of U.S. population growth. Yet 2024-25 saw a decline in immigration down to 1.3 million people, leading to the much smaller population growth the Census Bureau just reported. Even so, because natural increase is so low, immigration still contributed to 71% of 2024-25 population growth. Without these immigrants, U.S. population growth would have been much smaller.

Weakened immigration led to state growth slowdowns

Just as the nation’s population showed substantially lower growth in 2024-25, so did most states—and much of that decline is due to lower immigration. Figure 3 shows declines in population growth in the past year for the four states that had the highest gains in 2023-24: Texas, Florida, New York, and California. All four showed substantially lower gains in 2024-25, with Texas and Florida registering gains that were 35% and 42% lower, respectively, than those of the previous year. New York showed a shift downward from a population gain of 215,000 people in 2023-24 to just over 1,000 last year. And California’s 2023-24 gain of 183,107 people evaporated last year as the state showed a modest population decline of 9,465.

Map 1 depicts 2023-24 versus 2024-25 population changes for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, showing that 45 registered lower gains in the most recent year. Three additional states—California, Hawaii, and New Mexico—shifted from population gains to losses, and one state—Vermont—lost population both years, with a larger loss in 2024-25. Only two states showed positive demographic changes in 2024-25: Montana, which gained more people than in the previous year, and West Virgina, which lost fewer people.

States with reduced population gains are located in all parts of the country, with especially large reductions in New Jersey, Colorado, and Illinois, as well as the states shown in Figure 3. Twenty-five of these states registered 2024-25 population gains that were smaller by 33% or more compared to their 2023-24 gains, including Iowa, Utah, Tennessee, and Nevada.

Because of these shifts, the ranking of population-gaining states changed in 2024-25. The top-gaining states are the Southern states of Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia. Due to their lower growth, New York and California, which ranked third and fourth in 2023-24 gains, respectively, rank 45th and 51st among the 50 states and District of Columbia in 2024-25. Texas and Florida still rank first and second, respectively (see downloadable Table B, left panel). 

Just as lower immigration was responsible for the nation’s reduced growth in 2024-25, lower immigration also contributed heavily to the smaller population gains in all states with lower gains or shifts from gains to losses.

Every U.S. state registered less immigration in the most recent year (see downloadable Table B, right panel). As Figure 4 shows, this is the case for four states discussed above that registered lower population gains (Texas, Florida, New York, and California). And in each, the decline in immigration between 2023-24 and 2024-25 represents a substantial part of the decline in overall population growth shown in Figure 3.

For example, Texas registered an immigration decline from 354,864 to 167,475 people. This was a large part of the state’s overall population growth decline from 599,331 to 391,243 people. Similarly, immigration declines were behind most of the reduction in population growth for Florida and New York. And in California, the decline in immigration was largely responsible for the state shifting from a 2023-24 population gain to its 2024-25 population loss.³

In fact, 30 states that gained fewer people in 2024-25 than in 2023-24 would have gained even more than in the former year if immigration had not declined. For most other slower-growing states, lower 2024-25 immigration is primarily responsible for lower state population gains or greater declines (see downloadable Table B, right column).

Another way of emphasizing the role immigration plays in overall state population gains is to calculate how much immigration contributes to a state’s total gain in a specific year.  Even in 2024-25, with far lower immigration than the previous year, immigration played a substantial role in contributing to state population gains, especially in those that have low or negative domestic migration or natural increase.

As Map 2 shows, immigration accounted for all of the 2024-25 population growth in 14 states. Among these are a number East Coast and Midwest states such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, and Illinois, along with Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oregon. In another 10 states, immigration contributed to more than 50% of total growth: Maine, Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Washington. Even in California, New Mexico, and Hawaii, which registered 2024-25 population declines, those declines would have been greatly inflated were it not for immigration.

The fact that even the low levels of immigration displayed in the past year contributed greatly to population gains makes the case that continued national immigration declines will lead many more states to experience population losses or extremely slow growth.

The contributions of immigration and domestic migration to post-pandemic state growth

While the discussion up to this point has focused on the shift from high immigration and high growth in 2023-24 to lower levels of both in 2024-25, it is also worth examining state population shifts in the years during and since the pandemic to get a full appreciation of how migration components are impacting population changes.

As the national statistics above show, the nation experienced a historic population decline in the first year of the pandemic (2020-21), which later picked up to a substantial gain in 2023-24 before falling again in 2024-25.

Yet these national shifts took on different patterns across regions and states. As Figure 5 illustrates, three regions—the Northeast, Midwest, and West—registered population declines during or surrounding the pandemic period, only to experience post-pandemic gains in 2023-24. In contrast, the South saw gains in every year of the decade, though markedly in the three years after the pandemic. This is illustrated in the different patterns of the largest U.S. states, shown in Figure 6, with coastal states California and New York following the decline-to-gain pattern, and the Southern states of Texas and Florida exhibiting gains in all years, and heightening those gains after the pandemic (with Florida showing smaller gains in recent years).

While some of the pandemic-era population declines across states are due to downturns or reversals in natural increase during 2020-21 (see downloadable Table C, right panel), much of the difference in these regional and state patterns can be seen by looking separately at two different migration components: net domestic migration and net immigration. The trends in immigration for each region and most states follow the national pattern of low immigration levels early in the decade with rises thereafter, until the 2024-25 drop-off. But domestic migration took different paths for large growing states in the Sun Belt compared to coastal, Midwest, and Northeast Corridor states. By and large, the former states (including many in the Mountain West) gained residents through domestic in-migration, while those in the latter group lost residents from domestic out-migration. This explains the continued higher population gains in the South and the declines in the Northeast and Midwest. (The West region reflects a combination of coastal states and those in the Mountain West.)

What is notable is that the domestic migration dynamic shifted markedly between the prime pandemic years (2020-21 to 2022-23) and the post-pandemic years (2023-24 and 2024-25). The prime pandemic years showed sharper net domestic migration gains for many Southern and Mountain West states, and enhanced losses for coastal and Midwest states as the pandemic spurred movement to the former from the latter. This was a period with stricter office and transportation shutdowns, especially in urbanized coastal and Midwest states—which, among other factors, led to a rise in out-migration.

But this domestic out-migration eased in the post-pandemic years, which Figures 7 and 8 illustrate. For the South as a whole, and especially for Texas and Florida, domestic in-migration showed notable reductions in the most recent years. In contrast, high domestic out-migration from states such as New York and California during the pandemic slowed.

Map 3 illustrates this pattern, displaying state domestic migration from 2023 to 2025, classed by their shifts since the prime pandemic period from 2020 to 2022. Twenty-one states, mostly in the South and Mountain West, showed lower domestic in-migration in recent years than in the prime pandemic period. (This was especially the case for Florida). Meanwhile, 17 states, largely on the coasts and Midwest, registered lower domestic out-migration from 2023 to 2025 than from 2020 to 2022.

Clearly, there continues to be a softening of the movement to the South and Mountain West since the pandemic. And even though states in those regions continued to lead the nation in domestic migration in 2024-25 (see downloadable Table C, left panel), recent downturns in domestic in-migration to those states make them more dependent on immigration. Likewise, even though domestic out-migration from Midwest and coastal states has ebbed somewhat, immigration is still necessary for their growth.

Immigration’s role in national and regional growth

This analysis of the Census Bureau’s newly released population estimates shows how important immigration is in sustaining not only the nation’s population growth, but also for most states. These annual estimates through June 30, 2025, show that the national population growth in 2024-25 was only about half of the previous year’s growth, and the drop in immigration accounted for virtually all of that slowdown.

Across the nation’s 50 states and the District of Columbia, all but two showed either a decline in population growth, a flip from population growth to loss, or greater population loss between 2023-24 and 2024-25. The recent drop in immigration accounted for most of these state population shifts. This is not only the case in high-immigration states such as Texas, Florida, California, and New York, but in most states in all regions of the country. Moreover, even last year’s low level of immigration still accounted for all of the population gains in 14 states, meaning each of them would have lost population without immigration.

Continued immigration is especially significant for regions that are losing population through low levels of natural increase and domestic out-migration; this is the case for many Midwest and coastal states. Yet the post-pandemic period has also led to smaller domestic migration gains in Sun Belt magnets such as Texas and Florida, where immigration represented an important source of recent population growth.

It should be made clear that even the lower immigration numbers reported for July 2024 to June 2025 overstate levels that will be seen going forward, since they include the last half of 2024 before the Trump administration instituted stricter rules about immigration and larger deportation efforts. The Census Bureau recognizes this, and projects that their estimated net immigration of 1.3 million people for the year ending June 2025 could be reduced to levels around 321,000 in the year ending June 2026.

Other projections by the Congressional Budget Office and the Brookings Institution also show national immigration downturns during this period, the latter allowing for a potentially negative net immigration scenario in calendar year 2026. If such projections are borne out, the impacts on regional, state, city, and county population growth will be even more dramatic than those shown here. Indeed, last year’s Census Bureau population estimates, which still included high immigration levels, showed how important immigration is toward sustaining population growth in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas and counties. This will be re-evaluated later this year when the Census Bureau releases new smaller-area data based on the recent lower immigration levels.

Overall, these new census estimates show that declining immigration has already exerted a negative impact on population growth in most parts of the country. As earlier Census Bureau projections show, low or zero immigration, even over a short period, will lead to substantial population growth slowdowns and even declines nationally, especially among the nation’s younger and labor-force-age populations. Such declines would have significant consequences for areas that will need to rely on immigrants to sustain their populations and labor productivity. Thus, these new statistics make plain that, to the extent immigration levels continue to be curtailed, all parts of the nation should be prepared to absorb the consequences.

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