New US Census Bureau statistics released October 29 show that the immigrant share of the US population remained essentially flat from July 2024 to July 2025, but the Latin American immigrant population fell by nearly half a million. Despite a significant increase in immigration during President Biden’s term, the immigrant share of the US population has grown more slowly since 2010 than during any comparable period since the 1960s.
In 2025, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) estimated that there were 50.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, in the United States—up from 50.2 million in 2024.
In 2025, the share of the US population who were immigrants, legal or illegal, was 14.7 percent—effectively unchanged from 14.8 percent in 2024.
From 2010 to 2025, the immigrant share grew by 1.8 percentage points, an average of just 0.12 points per year, the slowest pace since the 1960s.
Since 2006, effectively all immigrant population growth has come from Asia (47 percent), Latin America (41 percent), and Africa (13 percent).
Without high immigration rates going forward, the total US population will decline.
Figure 1 shows the Census Bureau’s estimates of the total immigrant population from 2000 to July 2025. The immigrant population—legal and illegal—grew from 31.1 million to 50.4 million in 2025, with 0.2 million of that increase occurring from July 2024 to July 2025 (which was statistically indistinguishable from zero). The biggest increase was for 2024, but that was mostly due to the Census Bureau updating its ACS methodology. The Census Bureau’s weights, which it uses in its population estimates, had failed to fully account for the unexpected increase in illegal immigration from 2021 to 2023. The 2024 and 2025 estimates account for that change.
As Figure 1 shows, immigrant population growth was suppressed during the first Trump administration. As a result, all immigration under President Biden only brought the country back to the pre-Trump trend: the 2025 estimate of 50.4 million is just above the 50.3 million the Census Bureau projected for 2025 in 2017. With President Trump once again blocking most immigration, legal or otherwise, the immigrant population is likely to fall short of the 2017 projection of 51 million for 2026.
Given President Trump’s late-2025 comments about banning all “Third World” legal immigration, it is noteworthy that the entire increase in the immigrant population since 2006 has come from Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans. The largest group (6.0 million or 47 percent) came from Asia, followed by Latin America with 5.2 million (41 percent) and then Africa, which accounted for 1.6 million or 13 percent (Figure 2). Asia has now overtaken Latin America as the largest source of growth since 2006. Although the Asian-born population rose by about 630,000, the Latin American-born population fell by about 460,000 in 2025.
More significant for the relative importance of immigrants is their share of the US population (Figure 3). In 2025, immigrants accounted for 14.7 percent of the population, meaning 85.3 percent were native-born Americans. The immigrant share was 14.8 percent in 2024—within the margin of error of the 2025 share. The 2025 immigrant share is comparable to rates in the 19th and early 20th centuries but lower than rates during the colonial period—which I estimated in a Cato article earlier this year using two different methods. The first added net inflows to the colonial population since 1607, and the second subtracted them from the 1850 Census—the first to record residents’ birthplaces.
Looking at the more recent period, the pace of growth in the immigrant share has slowed sharply (Figure 4). From 2010 to 2025, the share rose by an average of 0.12 percentage points per year, less than half the 0.31-point annual pace of the 1990s and below the pace in every decade since the 1960s, when the share actually declined. In a global context, the US immigrant population share still ranks toward the bottom of wealthy countries.
Although the 2025 immigrant share nearly matches the highest percentage since the end of the 18th century, this feat is not the result of higher annual immigration rates than in the early 20th century; rather, it came about despite significantly lower annual rates. In fact, the immigrant share of the US population has risen as much as it has because population growth has slowed dramatically (Figure 5). Lower total population growth means any level of immigration has a greater effect on the immigrant share over time than it did in the early 20th century, when US-born population growth was much faster.
The Census Bureau also projected in 2023 how immigration levels will affect future US population growth, accounting for the immigrants’ children and grandchildren. Its projections show that the United States will confront population decline in the coming decades unless there are “high levels” of immigration every year. High levels of net migration in the Census Bureau’s categorization (1.6 million) are roughly the pace of immigration from 2021 to 2025, when the immigrant population grew by about 1.3 million per year, net of deaths (roughly 300,000 deaths per year). Without any immigration, the US population would begin to decline immediately (Figure 6).
The 2025 data show that the surge in immigration from 2021 to 2024 has leveled off. Hopefully, immigration rates will return to higher levels, because slower population growth creates a litany of economic challenges for the United States, as I explained in my testimony before the US Senate Budget Committee. Right now, America’s politicians seem far more concerned with the supposedly unsustainable increases in immigration than with the collapsing worker-to-retiree ratio and the catastrophic loss of skilled workers from the United States to China and other countries.
America needs people both in the short and long term, and it needs workers of all skill levels. Immigrants can help contribute, and they should be allowed to do so legally.
This is an update of my post on the same topic last year.
