Isn’t the US population growing? Trump’s fault (also).

According to the Budget Office, the total U.S. population is expected to stop growing in 2056 and remain about the same in the years that follow. However, without immigration, the number of inhabitants would begin to decline as early as 2030, when deaths will exceed births, making immigrants an increasingly important source of population growth, as highlighted by the report.

In September, the office released a report indicating that Trump’s plans for mass deportations and other harsh immigration measures would lead to the expulsion of about 320,000 people from the United States over the next 10 years.

The White House has expelled more than 600,000 individuals from the United States in 2025 alone as part of its mass deportation campaign. Furthermore, according to the Trump administration, almost two million have self-deported, although there are no official estimates to confirm the figures presented by the government.

Donald Trump has used several methods to remove people from the United States, including banning visas for immigrants from certain countries and deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in US cities to track down immigrants present illegally in the country.

In all this, even if immigration restrictions and the increase in expulsions were to end with the end of the Trump administration in three years, “it would still be a demographic shock”, revealed William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution study center.

With fewer immigrants in the workforce and projections for U.S. fertility rates showing a long-term decline below replacement levels, “this will reduce the number of children that will be born in this four-year period” of the second Trump administration, Frey said.

Social security and healthcare, already strained by an aging population, will come under increased pressure as fewer people in the labor market pay taxes. Not to mention that, by the end of the decade, all members of the baby boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, will be over 65 and retired.

When it comes to estimating a nation’s population and its future growth, immigration always represents an unpredictable factor, as it varies much more from year to year than the number of births and deaths. Historically, immigration has fueled U.S. population growth this decade due to an aging population and a fertility rate below the replacement rate.

For a generation to reproduce without the contribution of immigration, the fertility rate would have to be 2.1 births per woman. However, it is projected to be 1.58 in 2026 and to decline to 1.53 in 2036, remaining at this level for the next two decades.

For its part, the US Census Bureau – the US census body – stated that immigration increased by 2.8 million people in 2024 compared to the previous year.

However, since Trump returned to office in January 2025, demographers and economists have struggled to understand the impact of his policies on the growth of the immigrant population in the United States. The bureau’s population estimates for last year have not yet been released, but the Current Population Survey estimated that the number of adult immigrants fell by 1.8 million people between January and November 2025.

These data, however, have come under criticism, with some experts arguing that they may simply reflect lower immigrant participation in the survey, rather than a dramatic decline in the number of immigrants.