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 change is being made in an effort 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 new approach 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 new methodology. Census Bureau officials wouldn't say Monday how much larger they expected the immigration figures to be in Thursday's release because of the change.
Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return 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 good approach in order to make our estimates more current and reflect recent trends that we’ve seen,” said Eric Jensen, a senior 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 Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office's estimate was 3.3 million people.
The group 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 time pressure or their government’s poor 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 certain to dismantle humanitarian parole, saying during his campaign that he would end 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 funding.
Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
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FILE - A pair of migrant families from Brazil pass through a gap in the border wall to reach the United States after crossing from Mexico in Yuma, Ariz., June 10, 2021, to seek asylum. (AP Photo/Eugene Garcia, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes drifted amid mixed trading Monday, ahead of this week’s upcoming meeting by the Federal Reserve that could set Wall Street’s direction into next year.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4%, coming off its first losing week in the last four. The Nasdaq composite climbed 1.2% to a record, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was a laggard and fell 110 points, or 0.3%.
Broadcom leaped 11.2% to help lead the S&P 500 for a second straight day after delivering a profit report last week that beat analysts’ expectations. The technology company is riding a wave of enthusiasm about its artificial-intelligence offerings in particular.
The market’s main event, though, will arrive on Wednesday when the Federal Reserve will announce its last move on interest rates for the year. The widespread expectation is that it will cut its main rate for a third straight time, as it tries to boost the slowing job market after getting inflation nearly all the way down to its target of 2%.
The question is how much more it will cut rates next year, and Fed officials will release projections for where they see the federal funds rate ending 2025, along with other economic indicators, once their meeting concludes. Fed Chair Jerome Powell will also answer questions in a press conference following the meeting.
For now, the general expectation among traders is that the Fed may cut a couple more times in 2025, according to data from CME Group. But such expectations have been shrinking following reports suggesting inflation may be tougher to get all the way down to 2% from here. Besides last month’s slight acceleration in inflation, another worry is that President-elect Donald Trump’s preferences for tariffs and other policies could lead to higher inflation down the line.
Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle has dropped his earlier forecast of a cut by the Fed in January, for example. Beyond the possibility of tariffs, he said Fed officials may also want to slow their cuts because of uncertainty about exactly how low rates need to go so that they no longer press the brakes on the economy.
Expectations for a series of cuts to rates by the Fed have been one of the main reasons the S&P 500 has set an all-time high 57 times so far this year and is heading for one of its best years of the millennium. The economy has held up better than many feared, continuing to grow even after the Fed hiked the federal funds rate to a two-decade high in hopes of grinding down on inflation, which topped 9% two summers ago.
On Wall Street, MicroStrategy jumped as much as 7% during the day as it continues to benefit from the surging price for bitcoin, which set another all-time high. But its stock ended the day down by les than 0.1% after bitcoin’s price pulled back below $106,000 after setting a record above $107,700, according to CoinDesk.
The software company has been building its hoard of the cryptocurrency, and its stock price has more than sextupled this year. It will also soon join the Nasdaq 100 index.
Bitcoin’s price has catapulted from roughly $44,000 at the start of the year, riding a recent wave of enthusiasm that Trump will create a system that’s more favorable to digital currencies.
Honeywell rose 3.7% after saying it’s still considering a spin-off or sale of its aerospace business, as part of a review of its overall business. It said it plans to give an update with the release of its fourth-quarter results.
They helped offset a drop for Nvidia, whose chips are powering much of the world’s move into AI. Its stock fell 1.7%. Because it’s grown so massive, with a total value topping $3 trillion, it was the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500.
All told, the S&P 500 rose 22.99 points to 6,074.08. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 110.58 to 43,717.48, and the Nasdaq composite rose 247.17 to 20,173.89.
In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.39% from 4.40% late Friday. The two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, eased to 4.24% from 4.25%.
In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly across much of Europe and Asia.
They sank 0.9% in Hong Kong and 0.2% in Shanghai after China reported lackluster economic indicators for November despite attempts to strengthen the world’s second-largest economy.
South Korea’s Kospi fell 0.2% as law enforcement authorities pushed to summon impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol for questioning over his short-lived martial law decree, and the Constitutional Court met to discuss whether to remove him from office or reinstate him.
AP Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
The New York Stock Exchange is shown behind the statue titled "Fearless Girl", Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Signs mark the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in New York's Financial District on Wednesday Dec.11, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Dec. 16, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person stands in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Dec. 16, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
People stand in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Monday, Dec. 16, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
