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Border & Immigration

Census: Immigration Will Be Main Driver Of U.S. Population Growth

By Adrian Florido / Border Reporter
Published May 21, 2013 at 11:07 AM PDT
This story was published more than 11 years ago.
A woman takes the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony at the district office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Newark, N.J.
John Moore
A woman takes the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony at the district office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Newark, N.J.
Census: Immigration Will Be Main Driver Of U.S. Population Growth
Immigration is expected to account for more of the nation's growth than births on United States soil by 2038.

New data from the Census Bureau projects that immigration will be the main driver of United States population growth sometime between 2027 and 2038, surpassing births on U.S. soil.

Exactly when that will happen is hard to pin down, because so much depends on immigration policy and global economics.

But assuming it does happen, it’ll be the first time since at least 1850, when the Census started collecting information about where U.S. residents were born.

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In a statement, a senior adviser at the Census Bureau said the expected milestone reflects the impact of continued immigration on the nation’s demographics, but also the aging of baby boomers and declining fertility rates.

The new Census data also projects that non-Hispanic whites will be less than half the population by 2043. For children, that will happen much sooner. The majority of the population under 18 is projected to be non-white by 2019.

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Adrian Florido
Adrian Florido is a reporter for the Fronteras Desk where he covers the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant and tribal communities, demographics, and culture. Before joining KPBS, he was a staff writer at Voice of San Diego. There he reported on San Diego neighborhoods, focusing on immigrant and under-served communities as well as development, planning, land use, and transportation. For a year, he delivered a weekly television segment on NBC San Diego. He's a Southern California native who moved to San Diego in 2009 after earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. He majored in history with an emphasis on the US and Latin America. In college he was news editor of the student paper, the Chicago Maroon, and also spent time reporting from Capitol Hill and working with the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. He also likes to eat. A lot. And he likes to run to keep up his appetite. And he likes good music.
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