Immigration drives US population growth to highest rate in 23 years

Immigration to the United States in 2024 pushed U.S. population growth to the fastest pace in 23 years as the country surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

This year’s growth rate of 1% was the highest since 2001, and was in stark contrast to the record low of 0.2% reached in 2021 at the height of economic growth. pandemic restrictions on trips to the United States, according to annual population estimates.

Immigration has increased by 2.8 million people this year, partly thanks to… a new method people who have been admitted for humanitarian reasons are added to the count. Net international migration was responsible for 84% of the country’s increase of 3.3 million people between 2023 and 2024.

Between 2023 and 2024, births exceeded deaths in the United States by nearly 519,000, which was an improvement from the all-time low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.

The group of people included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country via humanitarian parolegranted for 70 years by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes due to time constraints or their government’s poor relations with the US. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted between 2021 and 2024 under various humanitarian policies.

Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of annual U.S. population estimates. While the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes one month ahead of the return to the White House of newly elected President Donald Trump, who promised mass deportations of people illegally in the United States.

The population estimates provide official population numbers each year between the once-a-decade censuses for the United States, its 50 states, counties, and metropolitan areas. The numbers are used to distribute trillions of dollars in federal funding.

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