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Immigration fuels growth in US urban centres, shows Census Bureau report
- IBJ Bureau
- Mar 15, 2025
Immigrants kept the largest urban counties in the US growing last year.
Core counties in the Houston, Miami and Phoenix metropolitan areas grew more than any others in the country primarily because of people moving in from outside the United States, according to population estimates from the US Census Bureau released on Thursday.
Without the international migration, Harris County, Texas, Miami-Dade County, Florida and Maricopa County, Arizona, would have had nobody moving there last year. That is because more people already living in the country moved out of than into those counties. Miami-Dade County would have lost population without the immigrants, since the number of births outpacing deaths was not enough to overcome the tens of thousands of residents who moved out.
Immigration in 2024 drove the overall US population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents. The Census Bureau changed how it counted immigrants last year by including more people who were admitted to the US for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons.
“A substantial excess of births over deaths has long been the primary driver of US population growth, but as this surplus dwindled in the last four years, immigration provided the bulk of the nation's population increase,” Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email.
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