The US Census Bureau is adding refugees to its immigrant count

The U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it counts immigrants in annual estimates by including more people who were admitted for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons.

The transformation is being made in an attempt to better reflect population shifts this decade, officials said Monday. Population estimates, including immigration, are due to be released Thursday showing how the populations of the United States and the 50 states changed this year. However, the recent way to counting immigrants will only be reflected nationally.

The percentage of U.S. residents who were foreign born rose to its highest level in more than a century in 2023. It could be even higher under the recent methodology. Census Bureau officials wouldn’t declare Monday how much larger they expected the immigration figures to be in Thursday’s release because of the transformation.

Capturing the number of recent immigrants is the most challenging part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced transformation in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a profitability to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.

“We feel confident that this was a excellent way in order to make our estimates more current and reflect recent trends that we’ve seen,” said Eric Jensen, a elder research scientist at the Census Bureau.

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional budgetary schedule Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional budgetary schedule Office’s approximate was 3.3 million people.

The throng of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of period pressure or their government’s impoverished relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.

Trump appears sure to dismantle humanitarian parole, saying during his campaign that he would complete the “outrageous abuse of parole.” The annual population estimates released by the Census Bureau each year are calculated from births, deaths, migration to the United States and migration between states. The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal capital.

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Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this update.

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pursue Mike Schneider on the social platform X: @MikeSchneiderAP.