Immigration drives US population growth to highest rate in 23 years as residents pass 340 million [View all]
Source: AP
Updated 3:15 PM EST, December 19, 2024
Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday. The 1% 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% 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% 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.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/immigrants-census-bureau-population-estimates-8ace336aaef647280a941065658d8fd0
Link to Census Bureau PRESS RELEASE - Net International Migration Drives Highest U.S. Population Growth in Decades
= new reply since forum marked as read