I highly recommend signing up for Philip Bump’s newsletter. It’s interesting and unique because he’s not only a good essayist, he’s also a numbers guy with a flair for making charts. (The newsletter is called “How To Read This Chart”) It comes out on the weekend and is very comprehensive. Bump is obviously one of those super prolific journalists I can only envy.
Anyway, here is one excerpt from today’s newsletter that I found most interesting because I haven’t seen very much discussion of this:
The U.S. population is in decline
Speaking of grim analysis, the Congressional Budget Office reported earlier this month that the country’s population is likely to start shrinking by 2030 without immigration. Luckily for us, we’re doing everything we can to encourage immigrants to come to this country. Right? I haven’t checked the news for about 13 months, so let me know if something’s changed.
Sometimes people suggest that population decreases are not a big deal. Those people are wrong, for a lot of reasons. Google it.
This possibility reflects how two important patterns are intertwined — an interlacing that’s important for reasons beyond just the raw population numbers.
Consider how state-level population has changed over the past 15 years. A lot of growth in the West and Southwest, stagnation in the Midwest and Northeast.
Now I know some of you are going to be frustrated that the vertical axes here are not labeled. Well, it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Just know that up-and-to-the-right means more population growth. If you want to email me about it to complain anyway, you can reach me at i.am.obsessive.about.axes@nowhere.bananas.
The reason it doesn’t matter is because I’m going to use the same axes to show the difference in growth between the native-born (non-immigrant) and foreign-born (immigrant) populations over that same period.
See how in nearly every state the rate of immigrant population growth is higher than the rate of growth among native-born Americans? In some cases, states have only grown because they’ve welcomed immigrants — a preview of the challenge that is looming for the whole country.
That challenge derives from the changing demographics of the population (and particularly the native-born population). I talk about the baby boom a lot, in part because I wrote a whole goldarn book about it.
But the combination of the baby boom getting older (its oldest member turned 80 on Jan. 1 of this year) and the advent of the coronavirus pandemic means that a number of states have seen negative natural population change — that is, more deaths than births — since 2000.
Fifteen states had more deaths than births in 2024 alone.
While I was still at The Washington Post, I wrote about how Trump’s attack on immigration (I read the news just now) comes at a historically bad time demographically. If for no other reason than that the increasingly large elderly population needs caregivers, the ratio here matters.
Oh well!
I’m pretty sure that we’re not yet in a place where robots can pick our strawberries, garden, raise our kids, cook our food or watch over our elderly. And there just aren’t enough native born Americans to do that work. It’s yet another sign of a society committing suicide for no earthly reason.
