The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that 338 million people will be living in the United States by 2025, about 57 million more people than in 2000.
One reason for this growth is that each year nearly 1 million immigrants come to the United States to live.
If it weren’t for these immigrants, the U.S. population would eventually start to shrink. That’s because American women are having slightly fewer children than it would take to keep the population at the current level.
Some of the world’s countries are not growing at all. For example, Italy and Germany will have fewer people in 2025 than they do today because so many women there are having just one child or no children at all.
But there’s still a population explosion in the world. Many women in Asian and African countries are having three or more children on average.
The fastest growing region in the world is western Africa, most countries there will double in population by 2025.
The first U.S. census was taken in 1790, when the nation’s population was just 3.9 million, about as many people as live in South Carolina today.
