Hugely important for housing, employment, and consumer spending.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
“Currently, the estimates of NIM [Net International Migration = immigration minus emigration] are trending toward negative net migration. If those trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years,” the Census Bureau said in a comment on its population estimates released today.
Net International Migration – immigrants minus emigrants – in the 12 months to July 1, 2025, plunged by over half to 1.26 million people, but that period is still a mix of six months of Biden’s immigration policies and six months of Trump’s immigration policies.
“If current trends continue,” the Census Bureau said today, NIM is “projected to further decline to approximately 321,000” in the 12 months to July 1, 2026. And it may turn negative the following year (green line = non-US-born immigrants; brown line = non-US-born emigrants; bold blue line = Net International Migration):
The total US population increased by 1.78 million people (+0.5%) to 341.78 million in the 12 months to July 1, 2025.
The increase was the result of 1.26 million people from net migration – the mix of six months of Biden’s immigration policies, and six months of Trump’s immigration policies – and 519,000 people from natural growth (births minus deaths).
For the 12-month period through July 2026, the total population would increase by only 756,600 (+0.2%), shown in light blue in the chart below, according to projections by the Census Bureau today.
But it cautioned that projections are always based on the prior 12-month trend, so the trend through July 1, 2025, which included six months of Biden’s immigration policies, and that a full 12 months of Trump’s policies could produce even lower population growth for the 12 months to July 1, 2026 (to be released in December 2026). Chart from the Census Bureau:
The Census Bureau had been struggling to account for the sudden and huge waves of immigration under the Biden administration that caused the Census Bureau to dramatically underreport population growth for those years. But in December 2024, using new data sources, including from ICE and the Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs and Refugee Processing Center, it revised up its population estimate by a huge amount: Over the three years through December 2024, the US population had increased by nearly 9 million people, according to the further revised data released today.
Then came the 2025 crackdown on illegal immigration, the deportations, and the “voluntary deportations,” plus tightening up of legal immigration, that produced another sudden and huge change that even the prior year’s new data sources could not pick up – one of the issues being that the data sources could not track people who’d left and were no longer living in the US.
And so the Census Bureau had to find additional data sources to track the people who were no longer in the US:
“Measuring emigration presents unique challenges because this population is no longer in the United States to respond to a survey or census. Further, there are very few mechanisms to remove the records of these people from administrative data after they have emigrated.”
The new sources of the data for emigration include, among others, repatriations data from the Department of Homeland Security and data from Mexico’s National Survey of Occupation and Employment, which includes a question about a respondent’s Residence One Year Ago (ROYA), which produced an estimate of Mexican-born and US-born people whose ROYA was in the US but were now living in Mexico (emigrants).
The chart below by the Census Bureau shows the population now in Mexico whose residence one year ago was in the US (blue = Mexican-born; brown = US-born; dotted lines = upper bound of the Mexican survey data:
The Census Bureau also conducts a separate monthly survey for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “Current Population Survey” (CPS), which the BLS uses for its labor force data. This survey includes the data on the foreign-born population in the US.
Today, the Census Bureau showed the trends through July 1, 2025, accounting for the first six months of the Trump administration immigration policies.
The foreign-born population per the CPS declined by 1.4 million over these six months, from 53.3 million in January 2025 to 51.9 million in June 2025.
But the Census Bureau cautioned:
“While the change in the foreign-born population in a survey over time can imply emigration, it can also reflect survey non-response, coverage error or the impact of population controls.”
And it said that the CPS is based on a “relatively small sample size” compared to the American Community Survey (ACS), “especially for the foreign-born population.” The ACS is the Census Bureau’s huge population-survey data trove.
And it said:
“We have historically used ACS data instead of CPS data to estimate the size and geographic distribution of the foreign-born population. However, the CPS provides more current estimates with the monthly files, making it a valuable benchmark that informed the emigration research for Vintage 2025.”
Hugely important for Employment and Housing.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will incorporate these new population data into its employment-related data, whose survey results it extrapolates to the overall US population. This affects total employment, the labor force, unemployment, participation rates, the employment-to-population ratio, etc.
We have seen in the second half of 2025 that growth in nonfarm payrolls in the private sector was weak, while the federal government and state governments shed jobs. But the unemployment rate has remained very low, and applications for unemployment insurance have remained very low, and average hourly wages have continued to rise at a solid clip.
Many observers, including us here, and including the Fed, have noted that one of the reasons for low growth of private sector payrolls combined with the low unemployment rate and the solid wage pressures must have been the dramatic slowdown in population growth in 2025, especially in the second half when the new immigration policies were being implemented.
And the housing market is going to feel it. The construction industry has been putting up on average 1.45 million new housing units per year, for-sale and rental units, single-family and multifamily all combined. Each housing unit on average is occupied by 2.5 people in the US overall. So very slow population growth, and even slower as projected, would further reduce demand in the housing market amid this surge in new supply. Bring on the new supply! Lots of new supply and slow population growth may solve a lot of problems in the housing market.
And consumer spending has been losing the engine of population growth. Yet, consumer spending, adjusted for inflation, has continued to grow at a solid pace, on rising incomes and big capital gains.
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Don’t know why all people in the US aren’t chipped. Numbers would be much more accurate and chip scanners could exist everywhere to find those not chipped or staying beyond visa, etc.
After you, Sir! You get chipped first. Me last.
Howdy Glen. Lots of folks are chipped. I still have a cell phone battery that is removable from the phone. They can find you if they want too….
We are being chipped. Just in slow motion. By facial recognition. That’s why the ICE agents are filming the individuals protesting. Others are being chipped by political party membership. Others in the checkout lane of the local grocery store as your loyalty card is being scanned. Others while getting gasoline. Others while they talk on their phones. So being ‘chipped’ is not the question. The question is what is and will our government do with this information and whether we the people will ever have access to what the government knows about us and how we are categorized. Think you’re not a ‘domestic terrorist’? Well, maybe not today but most assuredly you are in the database somewhere just waiting for a future poorly monitored Elon to change your designation. So the government has a good idea about you just as they have a good idea about your comings and goings and a good idea about what this means for the future housing market. Yeah, I know, Hollywood had this idea down years ago – probably where Palantir got the idea.
I remember watching a documentary about the police trying to nab mob members in the 90’s. The mob members would hold their meetings in the street to avoid bugs, and would turn off their flip phones to avoid cell tower triangulation location. The police were able to remotely turn on only the microphone of one of the mobster flip phones and record the conversation in the street. Nabbed. This was flip phone tech in the 90’s. Imagine the possibilities now.
If they take ANY phones to those meetings these days, they don’t know what they’re doing.
At work, in secured areas, they force us to deposit our phones in a lock box before we enter the room.
wow.. what an epic response. i’ve no other value to add. just wow.
let me add social media profile in there, and data harvested from our “private” conversations via big tech platforms.
Some things you cannot put a price tag on.
Most underrated economic indicator is net migration. It has been and continues to be viewed through a social lens, void of any economic consideration.
Deflationary on housing, healthcare, insurance, grocery prices. Inflationary on wages. Likely to put pressure on stocks unless AI is able to counter balance wage costs with added productivity.
Your second paragraph sounds good.
The bigger implication is electoral votes. As waves of new immigrants leave blue states or are not coming into blue states, they will lose electoral votes to red states. This is a generalized statement and is not universally true, but it’s enough true that there’s probably a ten to fifteen count switch in the 2030 census.
Glad to see this population decline.
As to the hand wringers concerned with ‘consumer spending’ decline as more illegal immigrants are self deported or otherwise removed from within the borders, it needs to be be clarified that such consumer spending by illegals is largely taxpayer dollars first stolen from the productive then washed through a few layers of elected and bureaucratic sticky fingers, before finally handed out to the illegals for votes.
Throw each and every one of the illegals out, forcibly if required. They need to be gone. Further to that, if any are naturalized presently, yet originally came to the USA via illegal means, throw them out too.
Get on with it…
As an Australian reading this I am mildly depressed.
Our “leaders” policies promote rampant immigration and ever increasing house prices to the detriment of everything else.
Australian net migration has averaged about 250,000 per year for over a decade. It dropped to less than nothing during the pandemic, spiked in a few years after and has now almost returned to average. Since the Aussie population is around 30 million, this represents under 1% of the population. An equivalent US number would be about 3 million immigrants, which is only slightly higher than our recent average of 2.5 million per year from Wolf’s chart above.
You have no idea what you are talking about, but thanks for the information.
IMMIGRANTS are not being called out as a “problem” by this article. Nowhere in this Wolf has said immigrants are the cause of housing prices or “the detriment of everything else.”.
He is literally saying – population growth contributes to economic growth (no matter native or non-native).
Immigrants typically represent ready-to-get-to-business aged people. They also happen to require having a roof on their head. Whose job is to ensure that the population is not fighting over artificial scarcity? Once you figure that out, you can attribute the desired actions.
If this depresses you, you should go out more and spend more time with real people, than reading some charts online. I mean it as a human being to another human being. This is not to patronize a fellow commenter. I wish you great health.
Net negative migration is a good occurrence when the migrants are negative.
MW: Dollar tumbles to 4-year low as Trump claims it’s ‘doing great’…
That revision is astonishing. In one year over 9 million people came to the country which is like importing the Dallas metropolitan area in one go. How could anyone have thought that was sustainable to an already inflationary economy?
That was 9 million total over 3 years. And I have seen figures suggesting the illegal border crossing figure was a bit higher.
Not to get political, but all the claims during the Biden years that Congress needed to modify the immigration laws in order to stop the huge influx of illegals has been shown to be malarky. As the data above shows, all it really took was the will of the President/Administration to crack down. From an economic standpoint, it is good that we have basically shut down the border. Yes, there will be some economic problems/issues caused by Trump going after illegal immigrants, especially in the agricultural and construction industries, but it will take years to undo what got built into the system by unfettered illegal immigration. And yes, some of the changes will likely increase both wages and inflation, but overall it should be a net positive.
Some economic issues? Your glasses are rose tinted.
“Border crossings” is a figure that has been turned into bullshit clickbait. It includes all those that were sent back immediately, and many of them were multiple border crossers that were sent back multiple times without ever living in the US.
Please provide references that added to inflationary pressures.
Wolf has highlighted in several other posts that there was a labor shortage and the economy needed people in all levels and matter of economy to produce enough to meet the supply side of the equation.
I’m not trying to defend immigration laws this way or that way, but boy are people walking in with confirmation bias and seeing things a specific way.
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What the good people on this post are desiring are “machines”. We want “machines” overnight to produce everything we deserve at the cheapest cost possible and not involve people to even build those machines, lest those people be immigrants. Because machines will not want housing, or compete with me for that organic tomato, two dozen eggs and prime steak that I must eat everyday for the same price. (Not saying ThePetabyte lives this way, highlighting common items that were lighting rods.)
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We’d like our proverbial cake and eat it too and blame people who bake that cake and clean the bakery after we are done.
Very good to see this. As Wolf has noted, it will keep (and has kept) wages up and unemployment very low (and labor participation rates high), and the increases in housing will put downward pressure on sales prices and rents. It will also help reduce inflation going forward.
What we need to do now is fix our legal immigration laws and policies, including getting rid of the fraud in the H1-B program. Harvard University sponsors over 125 new H1-B visa holders every year. I mean, really, how can a university like that not be able to find people to fill their positions? Don’t they graduate enough students (grad and undergrad) to meet all their needs? More likely, it is just a refusal to pay enough, and thus they want cheaper foreign labor, which is what the H1-B program is NOT supposed to provide?
I truly believe the semi-untold story of several countries is declining population base. China, Japan and most European counties. The implications will be significant. It doesn’t take long for low birthrates to significantly reduce a population. Grok-“China: Fertility fell sharply from the 1970s (pre-one-child policy) and below replacement by the 1990s. Population peaked around 2022 and is now declining, illustrating a ~30–50 year lag from rapid fertility drop.”
Just reproductive rates mind you. Legal immigration has been beneficial for the country and should be encouraged. We need educated innovators and we need service workers and people willing to do the jobs that we either do not choose to do or refuse to do. I worked in a kitchen during college cleaning dishes and that taught me I never wanted to do that job again.
H–2B Visas are a way to *legally* bring low-skilled labor into the USA, on a temporary basis. It is a sort of Standing Repo Facility for labor, and the USA should use it properly. Illegal immigration needs to end, rather than being accommodated when the political wind chages direction. Legal immigrants have to wait in line, and are disrespected by every illegal immigrant that the USA let in by looking the other way at the border.
I’m so tired of the argument that Americans won’t do those jobs. They will, just not at those wages.
>we need to bring people in to do the jobs no one is willing to do
Boomer take from the 90s. If you reduce labor supply, you increase wages. They’re importing people to reduce YOUR wages. But you’ll never be convinced
Plenty of studies have contradicted that particular bit of conventional wisdom. Similar to the canard that increasing minimum wage eliminates jobs.
Sometimes Econ 101 is too simple to be useful.
If one has a good economy more people don’t “take jobs”…the economy grows and creates even more job demand.
But in a poor economy, immigration can increase jobless rates.
Finally, I don’t think the US is anti immigrant. There is a stark difference between legal and illegal immigration. Not to be political but I sadly see little talk of legal immigration policy revisions but maybe it just gets drowned out
Natural pollination increase of 0.2% annual and dropping means that if the immigration crackdown continues, that will be us in just a couple of years. I wonder how much we will all be ok with being a shrinking proportion of the world’s population (and therefore world power).
Population not pollination
There are 1.4 billion people in China. China is about the size of the lower 48. Even mid-size cities in China have 10 million inhabitants. It is perfectly normal for Chinese people, squeezed together so tightly, to choose to have fewer children. China will be a great country even with a smaller population. When I was born, there were about 2.5 billion people on this planet. Now there are 8.3 billion. Human beings went nuts during this time. It’s time for people to be rational about it, and as we can see in the fertility rates, people are being rational about it. Humans are not all that dumb.
I don’t agree that this is a good thing. Only 2 ways to grow an economy(GDP)-increase the number of people working, or increase how much each worker produces. Immigration has always been the secret sauce that helps America’s economy grow, so that Debt/GDP stays manageable, and the borderline Ponzi scheme programs like Social Security stay solvent. Low immigration/low birth rate countries like Japan and Italy have seen poor Economic growth the past few decades, and that will be our future as well if we choke off immigration and the younger generations don’t start having more kids.
This is ridiculous. Increasing the economy doesn’t help Americans when its fruits are now shared by more people.
Isn’t it obvious by now immigration has irreversibly changed to cultural and social norms of not only England but also the majority of the Western European countries? The rise of the EU’s populist right is a consequence, not a cause.
The number of children that must be born to sustain a stable population from one generation to another in developed countries requires an average of 2.1 children per woman. In 2024, China’s fertility rate was only 1.01 births per woman. In 1990 it was 2.51.
Apparently after increasing for generations the average IQ of an American is now decreasing. Is that an indirect effect of immigration or just an indication of human devolution.
Negative population growth may be necessary if AI and robotics replace workers as many people think it will. The productivity per person will increase rapidly if technology replaces people. The working population will age pretty rapidly. but your care worker in the nursing home may well have to be a robot. Welcome to the new world!
One can also increase the value of what each worker produces.
Willy K
1. For people, economic growth per se is meaningless. What is meaningful for people is per-capita economic growth.
2. Economic growth this year is rocking and rolling.
3. Some controlled immigration is fine. Illegal immigration is not fine. It’s a form of wage repression, including wages of legal immigrants and people at the lower end of the pay scales.
“Over the three years through December 2024, the US population had increased by nearly 9 million people”
Well, there’s the smoking gun for the outsized shelter inflation we saw since 2021. There were only 44 million rental housing units in 2019. The nine million new immigrants had to sleep somewhere, and I’m guessing most of them were sleeping in those rental units. That also drove up investor interest in owning Single Family Residences, which invariably drove up the price of residential real estate. The step function in demand made it impossible to build real estate fast enough to accomodate the immigrants.
H1-B & L1 visas have been a scam for at least 20 years, significantly reducing opportunities for US citizens as knowledge workers.
People have been declaring for years that declining birth rates will lead to a population crisis & huge increase in unfunded SS & Medicare liabilities.
Now, we’re staring down the barrel of the rise of AI & robotics, and we have at least 20M undocumented illegals (12-15M as Trump came into office + 10M under Biden).
Between the 1M or so H1-B / L1 visas, undocumented workers taking up all sorts of jobs in residential construction, for example, & AI / robotics looming large, I would say we’re long overdue for an extended period of negative net migration.
The structural economic & social changes coming our way in the next 10 years will be astounding. Nobody, including little ole me or Musk knows how all of this is going to shake out for us or the Chinese for that matter with 1.42B people.
What will all the rich San Franciscans and Bay Area wealthy do for housekeepers, gardeners, mechanics, bodyguards, plumbers, electricians, waiters/waitresses, etc.? On top of population stagnation, many want to move out of state due to a prohibitive cost of living. Five alarm fire dead ahead?
These rich people may have to pay more to hire their housekeepers. That would be a great thing.
That’s what a labor market does very well, if left alone: supply and demand. Unlimited supply (open borders, offshoring) puts downward pressure on the price of labor. Tight supply increases the price of labor.
Big business will not like lower demand for its products and having to pay higher wages. Housing prices should also come down. Good news for the average joe, bad news for Wall Street (boo-hoo).
Wouldn’t the negative immigration impact the rental market more than the for sale market
When rental demand drops, rent prices drop
When rent prices drop a few things happen:
1. If renting is significantly cheaper people rent longer, reducing buyer demand
2. With rents down, the price of a property to cash flow needs to be lower. This pull investment buyer demand out
3. If rents drop far enough and property taxes, ins and maintenance keep going up – investors who bought in the last few years may start losing lots of money and sell this increasing supply
When buyer demand is reduced further – prices drop or people continue to pull their properties because they can’t get a 2021 price for it
@Hudson
Wolf, this is crazy – your article is being purposefully read as an anti-immigration narrative. People have cornered themselves into believing that any positive societal effect of slowing population growth is a testament to anti-immigration and that any negative effects can simply be ignored to serve their biases.
I see, read and understand your wording is very careful and you can’t control how people absorb information – but this is the starkest example of confirmation bias I’ve seen.
If I’m being stupid – call me out. Thanks for everything.
Your correct, the “illegal immigrant ” is a mantra or stigma in our society today. Thank goodness we have both