Immigration has led to the highest population growth in the United States in the last 2 decades
The migrant flow According to a report released Thursday by the US Census Bureau, US population growth in 2024 led to the fastest growth rate in 23 years as the country’s population surpassed 340 million.
Between 2023 and 2024, the US population grew by about 1%, the highest increase since 2001. In contrast, the 0.2% growth rate in 2021 is a record low at a time when pandemic restrictions on travel to the U.S. are high, according to annual population estimates.
Immigration rose by almost 2.8 million this year, thanks in part to a new counting method that adds people admitted for humanitarian reasons.
Net international migration, which the Census Bureau says accounts for any residential change across U.S. borders, was a critical component of the change driving residential population growth.
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This photo shows migrants at the southern border in Arizona. (US Border Patrol)
Net international migration accounted for 84% of the country’s 3.3 million person increase last year.
The increase reflects a continued upward trend in international migration, with a net increase of 1.7 million in 2022 and 2.3 million in 2023.
“Improved integration of federal immigration data sources has improved the methodology of our estimates,” said Christine Hartley, assistant director of estimates and projections. “With this update, we can better understand how the recent increase in international migration has affected the country’s overall population growth.”
Births outnumbered deaths in the US by almost 519,000 last year, an increase of more than 146,000 from the historic low in 2021, but still well below the high points of previous decades.
On August 30, 2022, a Haitian migrant who boarded a bus transporting migrants to the United States at the Senda de Vida shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, was released on humanitarian parole. (Michael Nigro/Getty Images)
The US Census Bureau did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the report.
Along with immigration statistics, the report found that the South was the fastest-growing region in the United States in 2024, adding 1.8 million people, more residents than all other regions combined.
Texas saw the largest increase With 562,941 new residents, it was followed by Florida, which gained 467,347 new residents.
Washington, D.C. had the nation’s fastest growth rate at 2.2%.
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Migrants wait in line to enter a migrant shelter set up by authorities as they wait to be processed through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, May 23, 2023 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Christian Torres Chavez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Some states — Mississippi, Vermont, and West Virginia — lost population, albeit by small amounts, ranging from 127 to 516 people in 2024.
Included in this year’s international migration calculations is a group of people who entered the United States by road of the Biden administration Humanitarian parole heavily criticized by Republicans.
The Washington-based Migration Policy Institute reported last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.
But capturing the number of new immigrants is a tricky part of US population calculations.
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The bureau’s annual estimate of how many migrants will enter the U.S. in the 2020s was well below figures cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated that 1.1 million immigrants would enter the United States in 2023, compared to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office of 3.3 million.
With the revised method, last year’s immigration numbers are now being recalculated by the Census Bureau to almost 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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