Photograph courtesy of Andi Rice for Alabama Reflector
A citizen stands with sign during a non violent protest in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S., on Saturday February 22, 2025. Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice organized the event for the public to show empathy to immigrants in the wake of all the anti immigration bills currently in legislature.
Courtesy of Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
A new report found that immigration and domestic migration helped Alabama grow despite continuing net natural population loss, and that the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies may slow that growth down.
The population in the state increased by about 1 percent in 2025, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data published Thursday by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. But the report found a significant slowdown in growth last year amid President Donald Trump’s attacks on immigration.
“The surprising finding is the rate of growth in the previous year then the fall off,” said Thomas Spencer, senior research associate with PARCA, in an interview Friday of the decline in immigration numbers.
Immigration, both domestic and international, has played a critical role in not only stabilizing the state’s population numbers, but also in increasing it. Without the influx of people moving into the state, according to the findings in the report, Alabama’s population would likely stagnate or even decline.
Since the COVID pandemic, Alabama has seen negative net population change. In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began, about 1,600 more people died than were born in the state, according to PARCA. That trend continued into 2021, when the natural population declined by almost 12,000.
Then in 2022, the number declined again by about 9,000 before stabilizing for a few years. In 2025, there were more than 2,100 more deaths than births.
Migration, both domestic and international, made up the difference. According to PARCA, domestic migration into Alabama went from 13,000 people in 2020 to more than 27,000 in 2022 and peaked near 30,000 in 2023.
“Alabama has benefited over the last number of years with a strong labor market with lower unemployment rates, lower rates than the national unemployment rate,” Spencer said.
However domestic migration then fell to 25,000 in 2024 and to 23,300 last year.
International immigration into the state declined even more dramatically. Alabama’s rate of immigration is small compared to the rest of the country: according to the U.S. Census, about 4.5 percent of the state’s population in 2024 was foreign-born, compared to 14.8 percent in the nation as a whole.
But like domestic migration, international immigration to Alabama jumped in the early part of the decade, going from almost 2,000 people in 2021 to more than 12,600 in 2023 and peaking in 2024 when more than 22,000 people immigrated to Alabama.
That number fell precipitously last year, when just 9,000 immigrants moved to Alabama, a decline of almost 60 percent from the previous year.
Spencer attributes the population change to the country’s immigration laws that began during the end of President Joe Biden’s administration and continued more dramatically with President Donald Trump.
“The ability to claim asylum that began in the Biden administration and has carried on to the Trump administration has ratcheted down,” Spencer said.
He also cited the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, including the use of deportations. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration deported 230,000 arrested within the country last year and another 270,000 at the border, more than the Biden administration did in four years.
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