Giving Compass' Take:
- Tim Henderson examines how a recent decrease in immigration to the U.S. has led to population stagnation, shifting political power to Florida and Texas.
- What are the root causes of these recent decreases in immigration and, thus, population growth across the U.S.?
- Search for a nonprofit focused on immigration.
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A drop in immigration amid President Donald Trump’s enforcement crackdown led to a decrease in immigration and historically slow population growth in the United States last year.
Activity at the southern border is at a historic low. The population change reflects the last months of the Biden administration, when immigration controls began to tighten, and the first months of the Trump administration’s massive anti-immigration and deportation agenda.
Five states lost population, according to the new Census Bureau estimates released Jan. 27 covering changes between mid-2024 and mid-2025. The changes suggest Texas and Florida could gain congressional seats at the expense of California, Illinois and New York.
States that did gain population were concentrated in the South, where numbers appear to give Republican states in the region a political edge halfway through the decade.
An analysis by Jonathan Cervas at Carnegie Mellon University predicted four more seats in Congress after the 2030 census for Texas and Florida, with losses of four seats in California and two each in New York and Illinois. Cervas is an assistant teaching professor who researches representation and redistricting.
“We are still a long way off from 2030, so there is a lot of uncertainty in these projections,” Cervas said, adding that California’s loss in the next decade could be only two or three seats.
Another expert, redistricting consultant Kimball Brace of Virginia, said he was suspicious of the sudden drop in California’s population. Earlier projections had the state losing only one seat after 2030, he said, regarding the impacts of the decrease in immigration.
“This acceleration in California’s population loss is not something that was in the projections at all,” Brace said. “I’ve got to be a little bit skeptical in terms of the numbers. It shows a significant difference in what we’ve seen in the early part of the decade.”
Brace was still working on his own analysis. William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said net immigration was about 1.3 million nationally for the year, down by more than half from the year before.
Read the full article about shifts in population and political power by Tim Henderson at Stateline.