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The influx of migrants in the U.S. in 2024 led to the highest rate of population growth in 23 years, as the population topped 340 million, according to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.
Between 2023 and 2024, the US population grew by nearly 1%, the largest increase since 2001. In contrast, the 0.2% growth rate in 2021 was a record low at the height of pandemic travel restrictions in the US, annually population estimates show.
This year, immigration increased by nearly 2.8 million people, in part because of a new counting method that adds up people admitted for humanitarian reasons.
Net international migration, which the Census Bureau says refers to any change in residence across U.S. borders, was a critical component of the shift that fueled domestic population growth.
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This photo shows migrants at the southern border encountered in Arizona. (US Border Patrol)
Net international migration accounted for 84% of the increase of 3.3 million people in the country last year.
The increase reflects a continuing trend of increasing 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 our estimates methodology,” said Christine Hartley, assistant chief of estimates and projections. “With this update, we can better understand how the recent increase in international migration is affecting the country’s overall population growth.”
Last year, births outnumbered deaths in the US by nearly 519,000, up from a historic low of 146,000 in 2021, but still well below the high points of previous decades.
A migrant from Haiti who has been granted humanitarian parole cheers as he boards a bus transporting migrants to the US at the Senda de Vida shelter on August 30, 2022 in Reynosa, Mexico. (Michael Nigro/Getty Images)
The U.S. 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 US in 2024, adding 1.8 million people, more residents than all other regions combined.
Texas saw the biggest increase with 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida, which gained 467,347 new residents.
Washington, DC had the fastest growth rate in the country at 2.2%.
Migrants wait in line to enter a shelter set up by authorities for migrants as migrants wait to be cleared by US Customs and Border Protection in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on May 23, 2023. (Christian Torres Chavez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Some states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population in 2024, albeit by small amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.
Those included in this year’s international migration estimates are groups of people who entered the US through Biden administration humanitarian parole, which Republicans strongly criticized.
The Washington, DC-based Migration Policy Institute reported last week that over 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.
But recording the number of new immigrants is a challenging aspect of US population estimates.
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The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s is much lower than numbers reported by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimates that 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office estimate was 3.3 million people.
With the revised method, the Census Bureau has now recalculated last year’s immigrant numbers to nearly 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
