St. Louis had best population growth in years. Trump immigration crackdown may kill momentum

ST. LOUIS — Amid declining birth rates and a continued outflow of residents, immigrants last year kept the St. Louis region’s population growing, albeit slowly, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Though St. Louis’ population growth is slower than almost all of its big-city peers, the metropolitan area grew more between 2023 and 2024 than it has in years, adding 6,420 residents to reach 2,811,927 and retain its position as the 23rd largest metro area in the country.

But 2024 may be the last year St. Louis sees much, if any population growth for some time. The one growing number among the region’s population statistics — international immigration, which area leaders have bet on as an antidote to St. Louis’ declining population — seems destined to fall as President Donald Trump’s administration curtails refugee and other immigration programs.

“It’s an interesting time for the region,” said Ness Sandoval, a St. Louis University sociology professor who studies the region’s demographics.

“It did find some success in its efforts to reach out to immigrant populations through the International Institute, the Mosaic Project. These are going to be difficult trends to continue in an era that, at the national level, is going to see fewer and fewer immigrants coming into the country.”

Without immigrants, the St. Louis region would have shrunk last year — and the year before that. More people are dying than being born here. And more people are leaving than moving here from elsewhere in the country. Though the St. Louis region grew last year, its 0.2% population growth ranked 306th out of 387 metro areas in the country. Among big cities, only the Memphis, New Orleans and Pittsburgh metro areas grew more slowly.

“There’s not a path to growing the population without immigration,” said Blake Hamilton, interim president and CEO of the International Institute of St. Louis.

The 6,420 residents the St. Louis region added were due to the 12,375 immigrants that came to the region, offsetting the net loss of more than 3,700 people who moved out and the natural decline from an aging population — about 2,200 more people died than were born in the St. Louis metro area last year.

“The natural growth numbers are not getting any better and we don’t expect these to get any better,” Sandoval said. “The region has lost its ability to grow naturally.”

Amid that worrying trend, the immigration growth was a welcome bright spot for an aging, post-industrial city. St. Louis’ positive growth in immigrants was foreshadowed late last year, when another census data survey found St. Louis’ foreign-born population grew by 30,000 people — a jump that exceeded far larger cities such as Seattle, Phoenix, Boston and Detroit. That figure includes foreign-born people moving here from elsewhere in the U.S.

Hamilton credited that growth in part to outreach programs to attract Afghan immigrants and Hispanic immigrants to St. Louis, often from other places in the country. He said those programs, funded largely by private donors, will continue even as the Trump administration has halted international refugee resettlements, forcing the International Institute to furlough 60% of its staff and curtail programs that brought 1,300 people to St. Louis last year.

“In the current environment, where there are so few levers that we can pull to increase net migration, these are established programs that have a proven track record of success,” Hamilton said. “I think we have an opportunity to mitigate against some of the national policies that are inevitably going to restrict our ability to attract international immigration through the same routes that we have in the past.”

The census figures released Thursday also updated last year’s numbers to estimate a small, 2,100 metro-wide population increase in 2023 rather than 3,250 resident decline it estimated last year, when Orlando and Charlotte surpassed St. Louis in overall population. Since 2020, the metro area has lost an estimated 8,900 residents.

“That the region saw a year-over-year growth in population, however modest, is certainly welcome news after years of decline and stagnation,” said Dustin Allison, interim CEO of Greater St. Louis Inc., the region’s main business lobby.

While there was an increase, the trends in the region remained largely the same this year. The city of St. Louis lost about 3,000 people, falling to just under 280,000 residents. It was a smaller decline than past years, but not by much. The census noted it was the second largest decline among all counties in the country, behind only Shelby County, Tennessee, where Memphis is located. Since 2020, St. Louis has lost an estimated 20,000 people.

St. Charles County notched the largest increase, growing by nearly 5,800 people to almost 424,000, or around 17,000 people since 2020. St. Louis County, which has long recorded a slowly declining population, recorded a 2,000 person increase. But that was due to immigrants; 620 more people died than were born in St. Louis County. St. Charles County and the city each had small natural population increases.

The Metro East and its 670,000 residents also continued to shed population. All but one of the Illinois counties in the St. Louis metro — Clinton County on the eastern outskirts of the region — recorded small population declines, and the Metro East as a whole lost 1,700 residents. All but one had more deaths than births.

If the region hopes to draw more residents from elsewhere in the country, and capture shares of immigrants moving out of Texas, Florida or other states that have grown rapidly in recent years, St. Louis needs to build more housing to attract younger families, Sandoval said. But the region has largely not woken up to the worrying future of population decline, he said, and continues to put up barriers to home and apartment construction by placating “Not In My Backyard” opposition to new construction, or “NIMBYism,” at its more than 100 city councils and zoning commissions.

“There’s a lot of NIMBYism in the region,” Sandoval said. “And there’s not one part of the region that you can point to, it’s Webster Groves, it’s Kirkwood, it’s Chesterfield, it’s St Charles, it’s St. Louis city. There is this complacent attitude that things are going fine. There’s no need to change.”