While foreign immigrants continue to drive the overall population growth of the United States, red states gained new residents primarily by attracting hundreds of thousands of Americans from other parts of the country, the latest national census data suggest.
The nation added 1.6 million people from July 2022 to July 2023, pushing the overall population to 334.9 million, up 0.5 percent from the year earlier, according to estimates released on Dec. 19 by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Foreign immigrants account for more than two-thirds of the 1.6 million population gain, the federal agency said. It’s the second consecutive year that immigration powered U.S. population gains.
A decline in the number of deaths since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to the U.S. growth rate, according to Kristie Wilder, a demographer at the Census Bureau’s population division. The combination of fewer deaths and foreign migration rebounding to pre-COVID levels, she noted, was strong enough to negate the plummeting birth rate and create a relative population gain on paper.
“Although births declined, this was tempered by the near 9 percent decrease in deaths,” Ms. Wilder said in a statement. “Ultimately, fewer deaths paired with rebounding immigration resulted in the nation experiencing its largest population gain since 2018.”
According to the estimates, there were about 300,000 fewer deaths from mid-2022 to mid-2023 than in the previous 12-month period. That helped boost the natural increase—defined as simply the difference between the number of live births and deaths—to more than 500,000 people.
At the state level, 42 states and the District of Columbia experienced an increase in population, according to the bureau. By comparison, the population increased in just 31 states and the District of Columbia in 2022 and 34 states in 2021.
The 11 states that lost population in 2022 but are now seeing gains are New Jersey (growing by 30,024), Ohio (26,238), Minnesota (23,615), Massachusetts (18,659), Maryland (16,272), Michigan (3,980), Kansas (3,830), Rhode Island (2,120), New Mexico (895), Mississippi (762), and Alaska (130), according to the Census Bureau.
Meanwhile, eight states recorded population declines in 2023: New York (shrinking by 101,984), California (75,423), Illinois (32,826), Louisiana (14,274), Pennsylvania (10,408), Oregon (6,021), Hawaii (4,261), and West Virginia (3,964). These states collectively had a population loss of 249,161 in 2023, compared to a loss of 509,789 in 2022. While many of these states have lost population annually since 2020, the declines have slowed.
Domestic Migration: Biggest Winners and Losers
When it comes to internal population flow within the United States, the South was the only region that saw more people moving in than leaving for other states in the past year. The majority of the South’s growth is the result of domestic migration, according to census estimates.“The growth in 2023 can largely be attributed to the region’s migration patterns as 706,266 people were added via net domestic migration, while net international migration contributed almost 500,000 to the total,” the agency said.
While the South is defined by the bureau as a regional swath from Texas to Maryland and Delaware, its population growth in 2023 was mostly concentrated in a handful of states: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina.
South Carolina, whose 1.7 percent overall population growth rate surpassed all other states, added 90,600 new residents this past year. More than 90 percent of that growth came from people arriving from another state.
Florida, with a 1.6 percent growth rate and a net population gain of 365,205, was the second fastest-growing state in 2023. Almost as many Americans as foreign immigrants moved to the Sunshine State.
Texas also achieved a high growth rate of 1.6 percent, the third highest of all states. Due to Texas’s already enormous population base, the high growth rate translated to a total of 473,453 new residents, the largest numeric change in the entire nation.
The West also expanded, with 137,299 people added to the region, slightly lower than the 157,480 people it took in the previous year. The Midwest, meanwhile, added 126,000 residents, marking a 0.2 percent growth after two consecutive years of net population loss.
However, the Northeast suffered from a population hemorrhage for a third straight year, although the loss was significantly smaller. In 2023, the region’s population went down by 43,330, compared with drops of 216,576 in 2022 and 187,054 in 2021.
“New York and Pennsylvania were the only Northeastern states to lose population in 2023, but the declines were considerably reduced from the prior year,” the bureau reported.
With about 38.9 million people, California remained the most populous state in the country. Failing to reverse the trend during the COVID-19 pandemic as several other states did, it saw the third consecutive year of population loss.
According to the estimates, California lost 75,423 residents in 2023, a drop of 0.2 percent from 2022. However, the drop is slightly less worrying than the 0.3 decline in 2022, and the 0.9 percent decline in 2021, when the Golden State lost a total of 407,000 residents to other states amid harsh public health restrictions and mandates.
