There are a lot of ways to measure a society and a country in decline. Economists like to track gross domestic product and national debt. Politicians and diplomats speak of global standing and the number of allies a nation can depend on.
But one surefire indicator, any demographer will tell you, has to be your country’s population. Rising numbers mean people want to join your country or native-born residents are confident about having more children. But if one or both of those accounts are trending sideways, it’s a good bet your nation is in some kind of trouble.
War, famine, and disease, of course, are well-known population throttlers. A bad economy and general hopelessness will do it too. But sometimes nations begin what can only be described as unforced errors.
The formerly thriving democracy of the United States had once seemed exempt from such foolishness. If we set aside the devastation of discovery visited on the hemisphere’s Indigenous people and a near-drop during the COVID-19 pandemic, the population trajectory in the United States has been heading in one direction—up.
But that population growth may be coming to an abrupt end this year. For the first time in its 250-year history, the United States is facing a drop in population figures.
For decades the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman has not been maintained in the United States, hitting an all-time low in 2024 of 1.59. But declining fertility has not been a major problem because of immigration.
Since the end of some economic doldrum years in the early 1970s, young workers from around the world have remained ready to join the U.S. workforce, a crucial support not just to the Social Security program on which American seniors rely but to maintaining the robust economy that has been the envy of the industrialized world.
But the era of immigration as a dependable battlement against population and economic diminishment appears to be coming to a sudden stop because of the Trump administration’s stark hostility to immigrants. Like China’s one-child error, the damage being inflicted on the United States this year is completely self-inflicted.
A rampage on immigrant workers was a policy choice based on political expediency—getting tough on immigrants was a vote winner in 2024. Now the president is following through on his promises.
Immigrants make up about 20 percent of the U.S. workforce. Now both legal residents and undocumented workers are voting with their feet and leaving what has become the unfriendly confines of the United States. According to preliminary Census Bureau data, more than 1.2 million immigrants dropped out of the labor force from January through the end of July.
The sociological harm that derives from population loss is well-known and consistent. A diminishing workforce saps economic vibrancy and creates higher ratios of dependency as a smaller workforce is forced to provide for a larger percentage of retirees. Labor costs increase and already hard-to-fill jobs in health, elder care, and agriculture become even more bereft of job applicants. Rural or rust belt communities that had been experiencing revival because of the arrival of immigrant groups will see that process falter or reverse.
If the United States’ population drop in 2025 turns out to be the beginning of an unstoppable decline, we will surely look back with profound regret on a time when Americans blithely stiff-armed newcomers and strong-armed tax-paying worker-residents into leaving.
This article also appears in the November 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 11, page 42). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Russell Lee, 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
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