San Diego managed to eke out a modest population gain in 2024, even as the county saw a continued exodus of tens of thousands of residents leaving for other parts of the country. Credit a surge in immigration that grew by 22% in just one year.
While the county’s natural growth from more babies being born yielded a net 12,600 new residents, it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the almost 24,000 more people who left the county than moved in between July 2023 and July 2024, newly released census data shows.
Making up for that loss — and a little more — was the county’s net gain of 24,226 immigrants, who came into the country both legally and illegally.
The county’s population now stands at 3,298,799, which represents an increase of 0.4% over the previous year and is just shy of the 3.3 million people who called San Diego home just as the pandemic was starting five years ago.
The latest population estimates underscore a trend that is being repeated up and down the state, most notably in larger coastal counties, and across the nation where growth in foreign-born arrivals was the primary driver of population growth in more than 2,000 counties, census officials reported.
In California, nearly half of the 58 counties would have seen their populations decline were it not for robust immigration, according to a data analysis prepared for the Union-Tribune by the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau.
Los Angeles is a dramatic example of that, having rebounded from a population loss in 2023 to a gain in 2024, thanks to a net increase of more than 100,000 immigrants, which offset a nearly equal number of people leaving the county.
While immigration remains a fraught issue, counties like San Diego will increasingly need to rely on foreign-born newcomers to fill the gaps in their workforce as more people pack up and leave, and birth rates continue to fall, demographers say.
“If not for international immigrants who tend to arrive at young adult ages, we would be losing even more people of prime working age in California,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California who has been researching population trends for decades. “And so international migration is important to San Diego, to the coastal counties, and in general, to California because we are losing people to other states, and our birth rates are at all-time lows.
“It’s also important for the economy that we continue to have workers to fill jobs, especially in health care, for example, for our aging population. If that flow dries up, we will be in a very precarious situation demographically that we’ve never been in before.”
Last year’s net growth in international migrants represented the highest level in at least 15 years. Net immigration soared to 16,641 in 2022 following a pandemic lull, then rose to 19,815 the following year before reaching last year’s count of 24,226.
That’s in part because the Census Bureau, with this latest release, was able to provide a more realistic count by changing its methodology to better capture real-time fluctuations in immigration. It is now supplementing its normal survey data, which typically has a lag time, with federal records that can account for recent trends like sudden increases in incoming refugees.
In years prior to 2020 when the new methodology was not employed, annual net immigration into San Diego fluctuated anywhere from 4,600 to more than 16,000, according to the Census Bureau’s yearly population estimates.
U.S. Border Patrol statistics for San Diego tend to bolster the rising immigration documented by the Census Bureau.
Migrant apprehensions jumped by 57% from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, along the San Diego border — from 216,955 to 341,580, according to Customs and Border Protection data. The increase came as border-crossing routes shifted away from Arizona to California last winter and spring, with San Diego County becoming the busiest gateway for undocumented immigrants crossing between ports of entry.
Many of those migrants were asylum seekers who waited at the border fence for the Border Patrol to pick them up and process them. A majority were then released into the community and given immigration court dates, with many staying in San Diego briefly – days or weeks – before moving on to their final destinations across the country.
In recent years, the need was so high for temporary shelter that Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Logan Heights started an off-site migrant shelter that had housed about 950 people since October of 2023. Most were from Venezuela, followed by Colombia, Ecuador and Haiti, as well as asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, said the Rev. Brad Mills, associate pastor at the parish.
About 65% of the migrants said they intended to stay in San Diego County when they arrived at the shelter, but it is unclear how many actually did, Mills said. The shelter, which closed earlier this month because demand for housing dropped off, was for people “trying to figure out their next step” because they had nowhere else to go and decided to stay in San Diego first, Mills added.
Many of the migrants were able to obtain work permits and typically found jobs in restaurants, construction, housekeeping and gardening.
Pedro Rios, the director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, who speaks with migrants at the border, said people entering the U.S. from 2023 to 2024 came from Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia. He was surprised that more foreign people have moved to the county over time because the predominant pattern is for new migrants to pass through San Diego to other destinations in the U.S.
“Many people who I was interacting with, in terms of newly arrived migrants that were coming in and seeking asylum, were actually not staying in San Diego,” Rios said. “They were leaving. Their intention wasn’t to remain in San Diego.”
But many more do stay, the census numbers show, which for now means a valuable pool of what likely will be much-needed workers, says Kristen Hill Maher, a professor of political science at San Diego State University and an expert in U.S. immigration and border politics.
“San Diego has a huge appetite and need for low-paid labor in our agriculture, construction and hospitality industries,” she said. “Many of the fastest growing jobs locally as well as nationally have been in these sectors, which have come to rely on immigrants as a substantial part of the workforce.”
What still remains a concern for San Diego County, say some demographers and economists, is the unabated flow of native-born residents leaving the region, many of them in search of destinations where housing is more affordable. While last year’s net departures weren’t anywhere near the pandemic peak of 39,315 in 2021, the total still easily exceeds the volume of people relocating to other parts of the state and country during the 2010s.
“People move for lots of reasons, but almost all of the net losses we’re experiencing are because people are moving for housing-related reasons,” said Johnson. “Either they’re starting their own household and they want to do it in a place where housing is more affordable, or they want to buy a house and they can’t afford to buy a house in California, or they want a larger house than they have, and they can’t afford a larger house in California. So those factors are driving people out of California in general, but especially in expensive coastal markets like San Diego.”
The ongoing exodus of locals, even if it has slowed in the past year, should be a clarion call to San Diego and the state as a whole to address the underlying problems for that population loss, says San Diego economist Ray Major.
“The census numbers paint a picture of we’re growing through immigration, but people are also leaving, and I don’t necessarily see that as a positive,” Major said. “If housing is too expensive or unavailable, which is the problem here, what can we do about that? And most of the reason is there’s too much government regulation keeping people from being able to build houses at a reasonable cost. And it’s not just a San Diego problem. It’s a California problem.”
From the Census Bureau’s perspective, even with the continuing outflow of residents, the latest estimates should be viewed as a feel-good story about the county’s post-pandemic recovery.
“When you look at the domestic migration numbers, you see the negative,” said Kristie Wilder, the lead demographer in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. “You think, OK, a lot of people are leaving, but San Diego County has largely been growing. The county did experience a drop in 2021, but since then it has experienced growth each year,” Wilder said. “On average, U.S. counties grew by 0.4%, and San Diego’s right there, despite experiencing net domestic migration loss.”
For longtime demographer William Frey, the patterns revealed in the new census numbers are a window into the future — and also a sign that there’s an antidote to what could otherwise be a shrinking population.
“Just from a numbers standpoint, if you don’t want your population to decline any further than it has, immigration is kind of the magic bullet,” said Frey, of the Brookings Institution. “Immigration policy in the United States is one of the biggest political footballs there is so I hope these numbers can help people understand why it’s important that we continue to have reasonable levels of immigration when projections show that we’re going to be growing nationally at much slower rates in the future as the population gets older and births aren’t as plentiful as they were in the past.”
It is a prognostication that applies equally to San Diego as well as the state as a whole, which last year saw its population grow by 0.6%. That was only possible, though, because of a net inflow of 361,057 immigrants, which easily surpassed the net departure of more than 239,000 Californians who moved to other states.
Union-Tribune staff writers Kristina Davis and Alexandra Mendoza, and demographer Beth Jarosz from the Population Reference Bureau contributed to this report.
