About a month late, presumably due to last fall’s government shutdown, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for July 1, 2025.

It provides an interesting picture of what the country is, and is becoming, halfway through the decade of the 2020s and one-quarter of the way through (have we really gotten this far?) the 21st century. It also provides some political dynamite, all the more explosive because of Census Bureau statisticians’ deserved reputation for apolitical rigor and willingness to admit mistakes, as it did on the COVID-19-plagued 2020 census.

The headline story is the sharp rise and sharp fall in immigration. The notion that immigration exploded sharply during the Biden administration and contracted sharply during the second Trump administration is not political propaganda.

After the expiration of most COVID-19 restrictions, immigration rose to 1.8 million in 2021-22, 2.6 million in 2022-23, and 3.2 million in 2023-24.

The snapback to 1.9 million in 2024-25 reflects changes in both outgoing and incoming administrations. With the election looming, the Biden administration in early 2024 discovered that current legislation let it restrict immigration in ways it had claimed it didn’t before, and under the same........

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