As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, it has accepted an unfamiliar report card of population decline for the first time in its history. The U.S. growth formula, which kept expanding as the "nation of immigrants," has stalled in tandem with the Trump administration's anti-immigration drive. Experts warned that tighter border controls under the second Trump administration are accelerating America's demographic turning point by decades.
On the 26th, U.S. local time, major American media outlets, citing Census Bureau data, reported that "because of President Trump's immigration crackdown, the U.S. population could decline in 2026 for the first time in history." The Census Bureau had initially forecast that the U.S. population would not begin to decrease until 2081, but radical policy shifts have sped that clock forward by more than 50 years. Bloomberg reported that while there were brief, slight declines in the U.S. population in the statistical record during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak and World War I deployments, a structural population decline driven by policy factors is unprecedented since the first census in 1790.
Signs of population decline are being detected in many places. For the U.S. population to grow, both "natural increase," which is births minus deaths, and "net migration," which is immigrants in minus those leaving, must rise. As of July last year, births in the United States outnumbered deaths by 519,000. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that this level of natural increase will disappear entirely by 2030. Net immigration would have to fill that gap for the population to grow, but the Trump administration is blocking that inflow channel.
Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution recently said in an analysis that the United States has likely already entered a "negative net migration" phase. They projected that this year net migration could range from a decrease of up to 925,000 to an increase of up to 185,000. If immigration inflows plunge and fail to offset natural increase, the total U.S. population will inevitably shrink. Tara Watson, director of the Center on Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution who took part in the research, assessed, "The U.S. population growth rate in 2026 looks likely to be 0% or negative."
The Trump administration regards this population decline as an achievement, not a crisis. The White House argued that fewer immigrants will lead to higher wages for U.S.-born workers and stabilizing home prices. White House Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, "There are enough American hands and minds to build the U.S. workforce," adding, "President Trump's agenda is to enforce immigration laws while creating jobs for American workers." White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently wrote on the social media platform X that "between the 1920s and the 1960s, when net migration was negative, the United States was the world's leading superpower with a flourishing middle class," adding, "All population growth came from family formation, not immigration."
Economists see it somewhat differently. Population is a key pillar supporting the size of an economy. When labor supply falls, potential growth declines, and the burden of social security schemes tied to aging surges. China, which has recorded its lowest birth rate since the Communist Party took power in 2025 and is seeing its population shrink; Japan, which peaked in population in 2010 and fell into long-term low growth; and Germany, labeled the "sick man" due to aging, bear this out. The reason the United States has uniquely maintained solid growth among advanced economies has been the inflow of young immigrants. AEI and the Brookings Institution estimated that reduced net migration will shave 0.3 percentage points off U.S. economic growth in 2025 and 2026, respectively.
On the other hand, some argued that wealth per person matters more than simple headcount. Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which supports immigration limits, said, "If total population determined national wealth, Bangladesh should be richer than New Zealand," adding, "Evidence that population decline or slow growth negatively affects GDP per capita is unclear." In fact, even as population issues have been constantly raised over the past decades, U.S. real GDP per capita has risen. There is also optimism that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will offset labor shortages and weaken the consolidation between population and economic growth.
But the immediate shock that population decline will have on the U.S. labor market appears inevitable. Labor shortages on the ground in construction, manufacturing and hospitality are already severe. Maintaining social security schemes is also a conundrum. A structure with fewer workers and more seniors to support makes it hard to ensure fiscal soundness. Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, warned, "Even when more than 1 million people died during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. population grew," adding, "What we are seeing now is completely unexpected, something we have never experienced before."