Population of New York City is expanding. The truth, however, is that for New York State as a whole, the population is actually beginning to decline. A new report from the Empire Center is shedding light on the population trends of the state as the calendar flips to 2020, revealing data on population patterns within the state, with some help from the Census Bureau.
The biggest takeaway is the flow of people out of New York, as approximately 1.4 million people left the state to move somewhere else in the United States since 2010. Furthermore, New York was one of only 10 states to see their population decline in 2018-19. In total, 180,649 people moved out of New York to another state over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, just over 45,000 foreign immigrants moved in to the state during that same time period, the lowest total immigration inwards since 2010. That makes for a net migration loss of nearly 135,000 people, the second-highest loss for the state since 1980.
Over the past decade, the state has lost 1,379,210 people to domestic migration, the most of any state in the United States. Nevertheless, the population itself taking all domestic and foreign immigrants into account has actually grown since 2010. As for the United States population as a whole, it has grown by 0.48 percent about 1.6 million people since this time last year, and by 6.3 percent 19,493,985 people since the beginning of the decade.
The raw numbers don’t explain why people seem to be leaving the state of New York at a higher rate than usual. The importance of the trend, however, cannot be overstated from a political standpoint; if these trends continue through the official 2020 Census, New York would be in danger of losing one of their congressional seats in the House of Representatives.
