Immigration Changes Affect Population Projections

By The News Service of Florida

A state panel this week decided to hold off on revising Florida population projections because of potential effects from new federal and state immigration policies. The panel, known as the Demographic Estimating Conference, meets periodically to analyze the state’s population.

It met Tuesday and said in an executive summary posted Thursday that revisions in projections “incorporate the most recent administrative and economic information whenever possible. In this regard, the conference principals agreed that emerging and evolving changes to federal and state immigration policies will exert downward pressure on Florida’s population projections.” The executive summary added that, because “these policy shifts are still in developmental stages, no data is currently available to model the magnitude of the likely impacts, nor their duration and timing between quarters and fiscal years.”

The conference last year projected that Florida would have about 23.33 million residents in 2025, with the number growing to about 24.77 million in 2030 and 25.91 million in 2035.