“Forty-two states and the District of Columbia had fewer births in 2019 than 2018, while eight states saw a birth increase [...] With fewer births in recent years and the number of deaths increasing, natural increase (or births minus deaths) has declined steadily over the past decade”, the report said.
The nation’s population was 328,239,523 in 2019, growing by 0.5 percent between 2018 and 2019, or 1,552,022 people. Annual growth peaked at 0.73 percent this decade in the period between 2014 and 2015. The growth between 2018 and 2019 was a continuation of a multiyear slowdown since that period.
“While natural increase is the biggest contributor to the US population increase, it has been slowing over the last five years”, Sandra Johnson, a demographer/statistician at the Census Bureau’s population division, was quoted as saying. “Natural increase, or when the number of births is greater than the number of deaths, dropped below 1 million in 2019 for the first time in decades”.
Forty states and the District of Columbia saw population increases between 2018 and 2019. Ten states lost population between 2018 and 2019, four of which had losses over 10,000 people. The 10 states that lost population were New York (-76,790; -0.4 percent), Illinois (-51,250; -0.4 percent), West Virginia (-12,144; -0.7 percent), Louisiana (-10,896; -0.2 percent), Connecticut (-6,233; -0.2 percent), Mississippi (-4,871; -0.2 percent), Hawaii (-4,721; -0.3 percent), Alaska (-3,594; -0.5 percent), and Vermont (-369 ; -0.1 percent) and New Jersey (-3,835; 0.0 percent).
The US Northeast region, the smallest of the four regions with a population of 55,982,803 in 2019, saw a population decrease for the first time this decade, declining by 63,817 or 0.1 percent. This decline was due to net domestic migration (-294,331), which offset population gains from natural increase (97,152) and net international migration (134,145), or the difference between the number of people moving into the country and out of the country.