Trump immigration policies and aging population slow U.S. growth projection, budget office says

People stand in Times Square in New York, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith, File)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. population is projected to grow by 15 million people in 30 years, a smaller estimate than in previous years, due to President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies and an expected lower fertility rate, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The nonpartisan budget office projected that the U.S. population will grow from 349 million people this year to 364 million people in 30 years, a 2.2% smaller gain than it had predicted in 2025. In September, the office issued a revised demographics report that showed Trump’s plans for mass deportations and other strict immigration measures would result in roughly 320,000 people removed from the United States over the next 10 years.

The country’s total population is projected to stop growing in 2056 and remain roughly the same size as in the previous year, the CBO said. But without immigration, the population would begin to shrink in 2030 as deaths start to exceed births, making immigrants an increasingly important source of population growth, according to the report.

Even if the limits on immigration and increased deportations end with the Trump administration in three years, “it’s still a demographic shock,” said William Frey, a demographer at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Social Security and Medicare, which are already buckling under an aging population, will be under increasing pressure with even fewer than expected people in the labor force paying taxes. By the end of the decade, all of the nation’s baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, will be over age 65.

With fewer immigrants in the labor force and projections for U.S. fertility rates showing a long-term decline below replacement levels, “that reduces the number of kids who are going to be born in that four-year period” of the second Trump administration, Frey said.

The latest numbers come as Trump has pushed for the largest mass deportation campaign in history. The CBO’s numbers account for the success of those efforts in the first year of his second term in office.

The administration has used a variety of methods to remove people from the country, including through a visa ban on applications for immigrants from some countries and deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in U.S. cities to track down immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Trump’s tax and spending law, passed by Congress and signed in July, included roughly US$150 billion to ramp up his deportation agenda over the next four years. This includes money for extending the U.S.-Mexico border wall, building detention centers and adding thousands of law enforcement staff.

When it comes to estimating the nation’s population and future growth, immigration is always the wild card because it varies much more year to year than the number of births and deaths. Immigration has fueled U.S. population growth this decade because of an aging population and fertility lower than the replacement rate. For a generation to replace itself in the absence of immigration, the fertility rate needs to be 2.1 births per woman. But it was expected to be 1.58 in 2026 and is projected to drop to 1.53 in 2036 where it will remain over the next two decades.

The U.S. Census Bureau said that immigration increased by 2.8 million people in 2024 over the previous year.

Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, though, demographers and economists have struggled to decipher the impact of his policies on immigrant growth in the United States.

The bureau’s population estimates for last year have not been released yet, but the Current Population Survey estimated that the number of adult immigrants fell by 1.8 million people from January to November 2025. But those numbers have come under scrutiny, with some experts claiming they may reflect a decline in participation by immigrants in the survey rather than a dramatic drop in immigrant numbers.

Last September, the CBO reduced its immigration estimate for 2025 by 1.6 million people, and it said Wednesday that the U.S. added 410,000 immigrants last year. Immigration is projected to gradually increase through 2030, and then grow more slowly through 2036 because of fewer international students and temporary workers, before jumping up to an average of 1.2 million people a year from 2037 to 2056, the CBO said.

“These immigrants bring both themselves and the potential for children in the near term,” Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email. “They contribute both to the labour force through their arrival but also to the potential future growth of the US population through their potential to have children in the near term.”

Fatima Hussein And Mike Schneider, The Associated Press

Schneider reported from Orlando, Fla.