Another view of the U.S. population
On Thursday, I looked at the way in which Sept. 11 was fading from public memory — not because Americans are forgetting it happened but because a larger percentage of Americans weren’t yet born when it happened. Fully a third of the country’s residents were too young to remember the attacks that day, a reflection of the inexorable progress of time, yes, but also of the shifting demography of the country itself.
That article included the chart below, comparing the population of the U.S. last year with the population the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. From 2001 to 2024, I noted, the population under the age of 50 grew about 5 percent. The population aged 50 and up grew by more than 50 percent.
I posted that chart on social media, prompting an observation from Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis.
After looking at the data: he is right.
Getting population-by-age data from the Census Bureau is a little tricky, so I used the online tools offered by the (essential) IPUMS Center for Data Integration. It compiles data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, allowing users to split up population numbers as they wish.
Below, for example, we see a recreation of the original chart with two differences. First, it uses the IPUMS data, so the values aren’t precisely the same. (That’s why there’s a spike around age 15 below that doesn’t exist in the original chart.) Second, I compared 2024 to 2020.
Using IPUMS, we can parcel out the population in each year relative to Americans’ proximity to immigrants. First generation Americans are themselves immigrants. Second generation Americans were born in the U.S. but have at least one immigrant parent. Third-plus generation Americans had immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great… etc.
Here’s the distribution by age in 2000.
And here is the dramatically different distribution in 2024. Notice not only that there are more immigrants in the population, but that there are more second-generation Americans in the younger population.
By combining the second- and third-plus generation populations, we can see how different the original chart looks. Now, population growth from ages 0 to 49 between 2000 and 2024 was not even 1 percent while population growth from 50 to 79 was more than 50 percent.
If we take out second generation Americans, the children of immigrants, the shift is even more striking.
Change in the 50-plus population over that time? Plus 58 percent. Change in the under-50 population? Down 9 percent.
What’s particularly striking about that final chart is how flat it is. Population distributions are often shaped like a roller coaster, with a big hump at the beginning that tapers off as people die. But the U.S. had about as many third-plus generation Americans aged 50 last year as it did newborns.
Population growth — and therefore economic growth — is heavily a function of immigration. The increase in America’s aging population (a function of the baby boom) will increase demand for service-sector jobs aiding the increased population of seniors, jobs that will need to be done by younger Americans. Curtail immigration and you curtail the working-age population both immediately and over the longer term, since those immigrants won’t be there to have native-born American kids.
And that could be a very big problem indeed.
Photo: Immigrants on Ellis Island. (National Archives)