Long Island population grew, but international migration plummeted amid ICE raids, Census data shows

The international migration that helped drive recent Long Island population growth declined last year amid the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown, according to analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday.

During the Biden administration, international migration figures in the region spiked from 2,258 in 2021 to 24,273 in 2024, according to U.S. Census data.

But by 2025, as federal immigration agents began intensifying their raids, the number of people moving to Long Island from another country dropped, coming in at 7,815, according to Vintage 2025 population estimates. 

Federal population analysts note that some of the nation’s most populous counties are being transformed by the decline in international migration to the United States, according to data for the period July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025, and 2020 Census data.

“The nation’s largest counties like those in the New York metro area are often international migration hubs, gaining large numbers of international migrants and losing people that move to other parts of the country via domestic migration,” George Hayward, a demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau, said in a statement on Thursday. But he added that the recent decline in international migration had led to some counties seeing either a population loss or a slowdown in population growth.  

Although the region saw modest population gains, Long Island has seen scores of residents move to other states, an analysis from the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics found.

In 2022, during pandemic, roughly 23,700 people moved off the Island — the highest number of outward domestic migration between 2021 and 2025, according to the analysis. In the years after 2023, the number of Long Islanders who left the area continued to decline, with roughly 9,630 residents choosing to live in other U.S. locales in 2025.

Between roughly 2020 and 2025, Suffolk’s population went up to 1,546,090, up 1.3% or 20, 170 residents over that period, according to the analysis. Over the same period, Nassau County’s population went to 1,398,939, or a 0.2% increase, data showed. 

Suffolk requested more time to review the data, while Nassau did not respond to a request for comment.

Stacey Sikes, acting president and CEO of the Long Island Association, which acts as a regional chamber of commerce, said the population increase is a clear sign “that Long Island remains an attractive place to live, work, and raise a family.”

“At the same time, continued domestic out-migration underscores persistent affordability and cost-of-living challenges that must be addressed,” Sikes said in an email to Newsday. “While these population gains are a positive step, the data makes clear that more must be done to retain residents.”

Even as people moved in and out of the area, the population growth was also fueled by the number of births on Long Island, which outpaced deaths — a phenomenon called natural increase, data showed.

In 2021, there were 2,942 more births than deaths in the region, according to the analysis. By 2025, Long Island had roughly 5,500 more births than deaths.

Jan Vink, a demographer and senior extension associate at the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics, noted that births in the region had hovered around 30,000 since 2022, while deaths continued to drop from 25,483 in 2022 to 23,524 in the 2025 estimates.

The reduction in deaths, he said, is not necessarily a sign that people are living longer in the region, but that many people who would’ve died more recently did so during the coronavirus pandemic.

“A lot of people … kind of died early, and I'm afraid we are seeing that now in the numbers,” he said in a phone interview.

Yet, he said, the overall population on Long Island has been on an upward trend since April 2020, as has the state’s Capital Region and the Mid-Hudson. Several other regions of the state saw population declines during this period, according to the analysis.

Comparatively, he said, Long Island has “a little bit less reason for worry.”