Census Says U.S. Population Grew at Lowest Rate Since Great Depression This Year

 The U.S. population this year grew at its lowest rate since the Great Depression, and the state of New York shrank for the first time in a decade, according to Census Bureau data released Tuesday.

An uptick in deaths, a slowdown in births and a slight drop in immigration all damped American population growth for the year ended July 1. The 0.7% increase, to 323.1 million, was the smallest on record since 1936-37, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The figures show Americans continue to leave the North for Western states, with Utah, Nevada, Idaho and several others in that region topping the country in percentage growth. Besides New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois also shrunk in notable ways, with the land of Lincoln losing more people than any other state.

About 593,000 people left the Northeast and Midwest to move to the South and West this year, slightly more than during the prior one-year period, the data show. The numbers suggest that the job lock and depressed home values that kept Americans from moving for years after the recession are dissipating, and that immigrants who started out in these regions are moving on.

New York, whose loss of 1,900 people put its population at 19.7 million, is shrinking largely because residents are leaving for other states. It has an aging population that is retiring in warmer places such as Florida, or staying put and dying.

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“As a state that has more people leaving than going [in], that is not a good thing,” said Jan Vink, a researcher at Cornell University’s program on applied demographics. “People claim it’s about the taxes, it’s about the weather. There are many reasons.”

Utah, the fastest-growing state this year, with a 2% gain, added nearly 61,000 people to lift its population to 3.1 million. Gains in technology and other jobs have led to tighter labor markets, housing shortages and rising school enrollment, said Pamela Perlich, director of demographic research at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

“There is a new economy being created out of the carnage of the Great Recession, and in a lot of those new growth areas, Utah seems to be at the forefront,” Ms. Perlich said. “You roll back 40 years ago, and we were really pretty isolated and much more parochial here.”

Another big gainer was Texas, whose addition of about 433,000 people accounted for 19% of the country’s growth. The state, with 27.9 million people, grew from a relatively strong flow of immigrants and people relocating there from other states.

Eight states lost population this year, including West Virginia, Connecticut, Vermont, Wyoming and Mississippi. Illinois’ loss of about 38,000 people, leaving it with 12.8 million, marks the third year in a row the state has shrank.

North Dakota, a fast grower in recent years, saw its population barely edge up this year as the state struggles with a slowdown in its oil industry.

Among factors weighing on overall population growth is that the number of babies women are having—which plummeted in the 2007-09 recession—hasn’t picked up as much as demographers had expected during the recovery. The mortality rate for Americans is also creeping up, in part due to stalled progress in preventing people from dying of heart disease.

The Census Bureau revised downward its estimates of immigration for each year since 2010 by an average of 10%. For this year, it estimated that 999,000 immigrants arrived, down 4% from the prior year.