Not since 1937, when the country was in the grips of the Great Depression and birthrates were down substantially, has it grown so slowly, with just a 0.62 percent gain between July 2017 and July 2018. With Americans getting older, fewer babies are being born and more people are dying, demographers said.
The past year saw a particularly high number of deaths — 2.81 million — and relatively few births, 3.86 million. If the pattern continues, immigrants will soon be more important to population gains than the so-called natural increase, which is the number of births minus the number of deaths.
“I think we need to get used to the fact that we are now a slow-growth country,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
Population change is a major indicator of the demographic health of a country and is made up of three flows — births, deaths and immigrants. In the United States, an aging native population has been buoyed by flows of immigrants, who in the past year made up about 48 percent of the total increase, Frey said.
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Over the past 10 years in every area except North Dakota and Washington, D.C., the number of deaths came closer to the number of births, said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer from the University of New Hampshire. But for most states, immigration and domestic migration made up the difference. Nevada, Idaho and Utah were the country’s fastest-growing in the year ended in July.
Meanwhile, populations declined in nine states: Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The pattern of rising deaths and declining births has taken hold in many parts of the United States, leading to fewer students and schools, diminished economic vibrancy and strains on social services.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.