If there's one enduring and consistent advantage the United States has possessed since its founding, it's the capacity to attract talent and expand its population. Now, as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary and the acceptance of Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies comes under scrutiny, the US may reach a historic economic and demographic milestone decades earlier than anticipated: according to one respected estimate, 2026 could witness the first actual population decline in American history. Even if this milestone doesn't occur this year, experts divided on immigration issues share a broad consensus: a second Trump term is accelerating the US toward a critical inflection point where net immigration will no longer be sufficient to offset the declining births and rising deaths caused by an aging domestic population. The more Trump restricts immigration, the sooner the US population is likely to plateau or even begin to shrink.
The arithmetic of population accounting is straightforward, though gathering definitive data is challenging. A nation's population growth is calculated by subtracting the number of deaths from the number of births, then adding the net figure for incoming and outgoing migrants. Recent research from the center-right American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and researchers from the center-left Brookings Institution indicates that the US may have already experienced net negative immigration. After analyzing existing data on the inflow and outflow of both legal and undocumented foreign workers, their latest analysis calculates that for the full year of 2025, the net reduction in the US immigrant population could range from 10,000 to 295,000 individuals. This would still imply a very slight net increase in the total US population. More striking, however, is the AEI/Brookings team's projection for 2026. They forecast that net immigration to the US in 2026 could range from a net increase of 185,000 people to a net decrease of 925,000 people—a prediction made before the US announced further new restrictions on legal immigration at the start of the year. The authors state that the primary reason for the slowdown in net immigration is a reduction in new arrivals, rather than the deportation efforts that are currently receiving significant media attention. The AEI/Brookings researchers did not extrapolate the overall impact on the total population, but they acknowledge the simple arithmetic: if their 2026 prediction falls at the lower end of the range, and barring an unprecedented surge in the birth rate, the total US population would decline by over 400,000 people. Even at the midpoint of their forecast range, the US is at least skirting the edge of population decline. It seems increasingly likely that in 2026, "our population growth could be around zero, or even turn negative," said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings and a co-author of the study. Demographers note that since the US began its census in 1790, it has never recorded a population decline. (The census is conducted every 10 years, but the government also releases annual population estimates for the nation, states, and localities to guide the allocation of funds and other resources.) The only potential "exception" was 1918, when the domestic population slightly decreased due to the impact of the Spanish Flu, while approximately 2 million US military personnel were deployed overseas.
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