International migration drove population growth in 2022

The U.S. population grew by 1.2 million people this year, with growth largely driven by international migration, and the nation now has 333.2 million residents, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Net international migration, the number of people moving into the U.S. minus the number of people leaving, was more than 1 million residents from 2021 to 2022.

That represented a growth rate of 168% over the previous year’s 376,029 international migrants, according to the vintage 2022 population estimates.

Natural growth, the number of births minus the number of deaths, added another 245,080 people to the total in what was the first year-over-year increase in total births since 2007.

This year’s U.S. annual growth rate of 0.4% was a rebound of sorts from the 0.1% growth rate during the worst of the pandemic from 2020 to 2021, which was the lowest since the nation’s founding.

Regionally, the Northeast lost almost 219,000 people in a trend largely driven by domestic residents moving out of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, as well as deaths outpacing births in Pennsylvania. The Midwest also lost almost 49,000 residents, driven in part by people moving out of Illinois and deaths outpacing births in Ohio.

The South gained 1.3 million residents, the largest of any region, driven by population gains in Texas and Florida that approached 500,000 residents each. Texas, the second most-populous state in the U.S., surpassed the 30 million-resident mark, joining California as the only other state in this category.

But California lost more than 113,000 residents, and had a population just over 39 million in 2022, in what was the biggest annual decline behind New York’s more than 180,000-resident loss. The population decline was driven by more than 343,000 domestic residents moving out of California, and it helped drag down the West region’s population gain to 153,000 residents.

Without international migration

and a sizeable natural increase of births outpacing deaths, the West region would have lost population due to domestic residents also moving out of Oregon and Washington.

Puerto Rico lost 40,000 residents, or 1.3% of its population, due to people moving away and deaths outpacing births, and its population now stands at 3.2 million.

Survey backed

Meanwhile, more than 100 racial-justice groups are making a last push on a large-scale survey that will be the basis for a public-policy agenda focused on the needs of Black people who aren’t as often engaged through conventional public polling and opinion research.

It is called the Black Census Project, but the activists working on it say it is not meant to duplicate the once-a-decade federal population count from a few years ago.

Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said, “very rarely do our communities get asked what it is that we’re dealing with every day, as it relates to the economy, our democracy, our society.”

The confidential, self-reporting survey available online takes about 10 minutes. Garza said if the goal of 250,000 survey responses is reached by Dec. 31, it would be the largest surveying of Black people of any kind in U.S. history.