California’s population stalled in 2024 and growth across the county slowed amid widespread immigration raids in the first year of the new Trump administration, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.
After years of slow growth in the post pandemic era, California’s population stayed essentially flat from July 2024 to July 2025, according to Census Bureau data released Tuesday. At the same time, the data shows that the United States’ population grew by only half a percent, or roughly 1.8 million people, a much lower rate than the previous year when it increased by 3.2 million people.
Experts attribute the stagnation largely to lower levels of migration to the United States from other countries as the Trump administration has sought to curtail immigration and embarked on deportation efforts in Los Angeles and other major cities. The foreign-born population in the U.S. dropped by 1.5 million people, or 2.6%, between January and July of last year, data shows.
In California, changing immigration policies, along with people leaving the Golden State for other places, an aging population and declining birth rates all contribute to the population slump. Continued drops in immigration could have long-term implications for California, said Dowell Myers, a professor of policy planning and demography at USC.
“It’s a very volatile period right now, especially with regard to immigration,” he said. “There’s no policy changes that can change aging or even birth rates—you really can’t move those—but immigration is the one thing you could change. Immigration was a real stop gap for us because it provides a fresh supply of workers that we need. We can’t fill our all of our job vacancies so we rely on immigration.”
In the past 125 years, the lowest growth rate in the U.S. was in 2021, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the population grew by just 0.16%, or 522,000 people, and net international migration was just 376,000 people because of travel restrictions into the U.S. Before that, the lowest growth rate was just under 0.5% in 1919 at the height of the Spanish flu.
Net international migration to the U.S. peaked in 2024, with 2.7 million more people arriving from abroad than leaving for other countries, according to Census data.
Last year, that number declined by more than half. From July 2024 to July 2025, only 1.3 million more people moved to the U.S. than those who moved away. The Census bureau projected that the trend would continue, with net international migration of just 321,000 people in 2026. Census estimates are eventually trending towards negative net migration, where more people leave the U.S. than arrive.
“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 wrote.
In California, where population growth is lagging much of the rest of the nation, the California Department of Finance projected last year that sluggish growth would continue as international arrivals decreased.
The finance department pointed to the Trump administration’s termination of most humanitarian migration programs as a factor in slowing California’s population growth.
“This is not necessarily good for the economy because population growth means labor force growth,” said Jan Brueckner, an emeritus professor of economics at UC Irvine. “If the population growth is negative or has depressed then there’s a labor force issue and many employers of unskilled workers are feeling the pinch.”
Over the last few years, California has recorded more people leaving for other states such as Texas and Arizona than it gains from internal migration. International immigrants, who now mostly come from Asia, bolster the state’s population against the loss from those who leave for other states.
Losing Californians to other states because of the high cost of living and housing supply is going to negatively affect the future workforce, Myers said.
“We want to reduce our net outflow of migrants and hold on to the Californians that we got, especially the ones that were that were raised in California schools,” he said. “We don’t want them to go away because we’ve made investment in those young people, but they can’t get jobs and they can’t get housing. So housing is really the biggest threat for our future.”
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