In its entire 250-year history, the United States of America has never suffered even a single year-to-year decline in population. Throughout the centuries, here, births and immigration have always outweighed deaths and emigration.
While we slaughtered each other in the Civil War, our population increased. During the Great Depression, our population increased. As we were ravaged by the Revolutionary-era smallpox epidemic, the Spanish flu outbreak, and the COVID-19 pandemic, our population increased. Now, we could be in, or at least very close to, our first-ever annual decrease in population.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, from July of 2024 to July of 2025, the population grew an anemic 0.5%. Rarely have America’s people added so few to their numbers. Though growth was even lower at 0.2% during 2021, that historically low rate can be attributed to the pandemic, which caused migration to nearly grind to a halt in addition to causing thousands of excess deaths.
We are obviously a long way from having a complete statistical picture for 2026. However, the Census Bureau’s already low net immigration projection for the year has already been revised further downward by about 17%.
Fertility rates have been declining in the U.S. and around the world for a long time. Yet, they are falling here even faster than expected. Last year, the average number of children an American woman will have over her lifetime fell to a record low of 1.57. However, in January of last year, the Congressional Budget Office had predicted U.S. fertility would decline only to 1.62 children per woman.
Now, if there are any MAGA dopes out there who’ve somehow gotten through five paragraphs of reading, they are probably thinking that a decline in population is good and attributable to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Well, deportations certainly are a factor in net migration. However, it’s not as though Trump has deported that many people historically: President Barrack Obama deported more than 70,000 more people during the first year of his second term than Trump did last year.
What Trump has done is far more impactful than just stepping up deportations. Though it can be broken down into countless variables and individual decisions, what is really going on is not fundamentally very complicated. People don’t want to raise children here, and people from other countries no longer want to come here to live and work, as much as they once did.
I myself am very close to someone who was literally bankrupted by the costs of giving birth. Meanwhile, parents can bring their children into the world for next to nothing abroad.
Good luck paying for health care, higher education, and housing. There are tons of other places in the world where this stuff can be had on the cheap, but here, you’re on your own. We’ve got pointless wars to finance, after all.
Wait a second, isn’t opportunity what immigrants have always come here for, to chase the American dream? Well, although Elon Musk and a few other immigrants do luck out occasionally, the myth has pretty much been busted at this point. If you really hustle you can probably get a job in America right now, but it isn’t likely to be one that is particularly stable or well-paying.
Of course, all the things I’ve brought up so far are financial, and there’s more to life than money. MAGA has ruined most of that stuff too.
America has become a very unwelcoming place. For example, it does not attract the best and brightest to send a federal army of masked goons to terrorize left-leaning cities, kidnap anyone who looks vaguely ethnic, and murder the U.S. citizens who try to intervene.
I don’t feel welcome in the land of my birth, and I’m a reasonably well-heeled white man. This is because the president of my country says just about every day that people like me — really, any people other than those enthralled to him — aren’t welcome here. Then his hordes of followers applaud and carry the harassment down into the capillaries of democracy. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be a member of more easily identifiable targeted groups.
It’s necessary, not pleasant, to resist America’s descent into authoritarianism. I would never father offspring if I thought they might have to continue this struggle their whole lives. Oppression is oppressive.
The slowing U.S. population growth, and perhaps decline, is concerning for a number of reasons. Chief among them is why it is happening, and this part is pretty simple. If the U.S. continues to become a worse place to live, then it will ultimately have fewer people in it.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post The U.S. Is Poised For Its First-Ever Population Decline And All It Took Was Making It A Bad Place To Live appeared first on Above the Law.