The Danger in Our Slowing Population Growth

America’s slowing population growth in 2025, just reported by the Census Bureau, signals a rising economic and cultural danger for the nation. It’s but a marginal comfort that the United States, in contrast with Communist China, appears in the past year to have avoided a drop in the total number of Americans. A fall in the population would have been a first for the nation, as these columns have marked, and one that is well to be avoided.America’s population in 2025 reached 341.8 million, the Census Bureau reports, reflecting an increase of 1.8 million over the prior year. That’s a rise of just 0.5 percent, according to the bureau’s estimate, compared with the increase of 3.2 million, or 1 percent, the year before. Last year’s growth was the slowest recorded since 2021, when the Covid pandemic led to many deaths and the population as a result rose by but 0.2 percent.The slowdown last year is traced by the bureau to “a historic decline in net international migration,” says the assistant division chief for estimates and projections, Christine Hartley. Some 1.3 million newcomers came to America in the year ending in July 2025, compared with 2.7 million the year before. Deaths and births were otherwise “relatively stable compared to the prior year,” Ms. Hartley adds.The slower growth is seen “across the country,” in the bureau’s telling, with every state except for Montana and West Virginia seeing slower growth — or an accelerated decline. The slowdown in growth is not surprising. The American Enterprise Institute, pointing to the plummeting level of net migration, had cautioned at the end of last year that America’s population was likely to shrink for the year.The slowdown in population growth, on the one hand, is a marker of the success President Trump has seen in getting control of the nation’s immigration system. Under his predecessor, an unregulated border led millions of illegal immigrants to flood the country. The total number of illegals living here reached a record high, some 14 million, in 2023. Since then Mr. Trump has tightened the border and deported many of these newcomers. On the other hand, though, the diminished pace of increase in the number of Americans poses a demographic problem. A growing economy, after all, requires an ever-larger work force. Immigrants have historically helped bolster America’s pool of labor, helping propel the nation to global economic predominance. As Mr. Trump put it during his first term: “We need people to help us, with all of these companies that are coming in.”That appraisal echoes the sentiments of Jefferson, who in 1801 marveled at America’s surging population after the second decennial census. “We contemplate this rapid growth, and the prospect it holds up to us,” he said then, as a prefiguring of “the multiplications of men susceptible of happiness, educated in the love of order, habituated to self-government, and value its blessings above all price.”The Declaration of Independence had, after all, specifically complained about George III preventing immigration to America. Here’s the way it is put in the Declaration, regarding George III: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”That perspective aligns with the Sun’s long-held position that while regulating the border is critical, immigrant labor — human capital, in other words — is vital to America’s future. “If America’s history is any guide, a soaring population is synonymous with the fulfillment of the nation’s potential,” we recently wrote. A slowdown is bad enough, but a fall in America’s population would be hard to interpret as anything other than a symptom of decline.

The Danger in Our Slowing Population Growth

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