Trump's Trials - A crackdown on immigration is leading to a sharp drop in U.S. population growth

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

The U.S. population growth slowed sharply last year due to a steep drop in immigration. NPR's Scott Horsley reports. Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detrow and you're listening to Trump's terms from NPR. We're under invasion from within. If you're not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will. We all serve at the pleasure of the president. The golden age of America is upon us. We are in the golden age. Each episode, we bring you the latest news about the 47th president and the policy changes he is pursuing on his own terms.

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We bring you on the ground reporting. from around the globe in just a few minutes every weekday. Listen to State of the World on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michelle Martin in New York City. The Trump administration's immigration crackdown is putting the brakes on U.S. population growth. The Census Bureau has just released its annual population estimate. It shows that there were nearly 342 million people living in the country last summer. Now, that sounds like a lot of people.

But that means that the population is only growing about half as fast. as it was a couple of years ago. And P.R. Scott Horsley is with us to tell us more about this. Good morning, Scott. Good morning, Michelle. So how big of a slowdown are we talking about? Well, the Census Bureau says the population added 1.8 million people in the 12 months ending last July. And the lion's share that growth, more than 70 percent, was from immigration. But immigration added less than half as many people during that 12-month period as it did during the previous year. You know, the Trump administration's been closing off pathways for people to enter the country.

either legally or illegally. And at the same time, we've seen more immigrants leaving the U.S., either voluntarily or through deportation. Keep in mind, the Trump administration was only in power for about half the 12-month period covered by this census report. The other half was the end of the Biden administration. If the Trump crackdown continues, census forecasters say, by next year we could see immigration dropped by another 75%. Jed Colco is an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. who used to oversee the Census Bureau. Those projections imply immigration somewhere in the 300,000 range,

and that would be even lower than the lowest point of the pandemic. Now, other than immigration, the other source of population growth is what's called natural increase, that is births minus deaths. That's also been dropping. Women are having fewer children. Baby boomers are getting older. Last year, births outnumbered deaths in the U.S. by only about half a million. Now, there was an even bigger drop during the pandemic, which caused a temporary spike in the death rate.

But if you go back to years just before the pandemic, the natural increase in population was more than twice as fast as it is now. So, Scott, your focus is economics. And how does a slowdown like this affect the economy? Look, population growth is one of the fundamental ways to grow the economy. The Trump administration likes to argue that having fewer immigrants will mean less competition for Native-born Americans, if they're looking for a job or looking for an apartment, for example. But a lot of economists think that's overly simplistic. You know, immigrants are an important part of the workforce.

They're also important customers for a lot of businesses. And Colco notes, newcomers typically add a lot of economic vitality. The slowdown in immigration risks lowering the rate of innovation and entrepreneurship, which immigrants disproportionately contribute to. Falling immigration is likely one reason that job growth slowed sharply over the last year. And when there are fewer people working for every retiree, puts a bigger strain on the finances of Social Security. So what does this week's report tell us about where the U.S. population is growing? Yeah, the Census Bureau not only tracks movement in and out of the

country, but also from state to state. And the report generally shows more growth in the more affordable parts of the country, like the South and the Midwest, while costly coastal areas are losing population. The general trend, though, of a downshift in population growth is visible all across the country. States that are growing are growing more slowly than they used to, and states that are shrinking are losing population more rapidly. That is. NPR Scott. Horsey. Scott, thank you. You're welcome. And before we wrap up, a thank you to our NPR Plus supporters who hear each show without sponsored messages

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