One side of that equation is immigration, and the other is SALT — the State and Local Tax deduction.
Presidents are supposed to be the president for all the people. But that doesn’t mean they have to cater to one side’s model of how to run a state. Blue states could face a two-sided squeeze over the next four years on their populations and budgets — not from federal overreach into state self-governance, but just from how Donald Trump and Congress choose to exercise traditional federal powers.
One side of that equation is immigration. As I noted yesterday, the biggest blue states saw their population declines alleviated in the past year entirely due to immigration. That’s not just my opinion; the Census Bureau itself concluded: “As the nation’s population surpasses 340 million, this is the fastest annual population growth the nation has seen since 2001 — a notable increase from the record low growth rate of 0.2% in 2021. The growth was primarily driven by rising net international migration.” Population growth is good, but there are costs to relying too heavily on immigration to provide it.
By its own account, the Census Bureau changed its methodology for estimating immigration, which accentuates in the data the surge in people entering the country since 2021:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2020 and Vintage 2024 Population Estimates Internal Research; U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs and Refugee Processing Center; U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics and Lawful Permanent Residents Freedom of Information Act request.
As the American Redistricting Project noted, the spike in immigration has disproportionate effects in covering domestic out-migration from the big blue states:
23 states lost population via domestic migration. The five states with the largest declines were:
California: -239,575
New York: -120,917
Illinois: -56,235
New Jersey: -35,554
Massachusetts: -27,480
27 states gained population via domestic migration. The top 5 growth states are:
Texas: +85,267
North Carolina: +82,288
South Carolina: +68,043
Florida: +64,017
Tennessee: +48,476
International Migration
July 2023 to July 2024 saw the highest rate of international migration this decade.
2023-2024: 8.23%
2022-2023: 6.84%
2021-2022: 5.08%
2020-2021: 1.13%
How big? I ran the numbers ranking the states in percentage growth of their population without immigration (i.e., domestic migration plus births, minus deaths, divided by 2024 population):
(The numbers do not quite add up due to a residual factor for people the census couldn’t figure out.)
As you can see, while some of the big red states such as Florida and Texas depend on attracting immigrants for some of their population growth (especially because Florida’s status as a retirement destination means that it always has a lot more deaths than births), most of the biggest blue-run states — California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland — lost population in 2023-24, if you back out the immigration figures. New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut were especially dependent on immigrants to stanch the losses.
Where Trump comes into the picture is the likelihood that the four years from 2025 to ’28 are likely to see tighter border controls, especially with regard to illegal immigration and asylum claimants. If Trump goes in that direction, he won’t just be imposing his policies on the country in general; he’ll be putting downward pressure on the population growth of the nation’s bluest jurisdictions, with potentially major consequences for the 2030 census and the ensuing reapportionment.
It doesn’t stop there. There’s a bunch of ways in which federal fiscal policy affects different states differently. One of the biggest is the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, which was capped in the 2017 Trump tax bill. That bill expires this year, and there’s a major fight brewing over whether to remove the SALT caps. Those caps impose disproportionate costs on people in high-tax, high-cost-of-living states, and of course, that’s exactly the same set of deep-blue jurisdictions. If Trump holds the line against SALT cap repeal, those states will feel a continued pinch on their ability to impose high taxes on their residents and then have them effectively subsidized by Uncle Sam. That, too, affects how willing people are to move to lower-tax states.
Those two factors, in combination, could do a lot to affect the internal balance of power within the United States by the end of this decade.