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January 30, 2025New research shows New Jersey is losing people to other states but its overall population has increased due to international immigration, a substantial portion of which appears to have been undocumented/illegal immigration.
In order to pre-empt some potential confusion about New Jersey’s population and migration patterns, Sunlight wants to put some new information into context. Sunlight has long documented New Jersey’s outmigration of people and wealth to other states (please see the “Taxes, the Economy, and Outmigration” Policy Issue category on our website). Recent headlines like “New Jersey leads Northeast in population growth …” seem to contradict Sunlight’s research. It doesn’t: New Jersey does in fact lose people to other states, but international immigration more than makes up the difference.
Michael Diamond of the Asbury Park Press does an excellent job explaining the research by Rutgers Professor James W. Hughes. Here are the facts:
- New Jersey’s population increased by 121,209 in 2024 (or 1.3%) to reach 9.5 million, a record total.
- New Jersey gained 130,692 international immigrants in 2024 (or 1.4% of the population), which more than accounts for the overall increase in population.
- New Jersey gained 327,188 international immigrants since 2020 for a total immigrant population of 2.3 million (24% of the population), of which 450,000 are undocumented/illegal (4.7% of the population).
- New Jersey’s net birth/death rate was a 26,010 gain in 2024.
- New Jersey lost a net 35,554 residents to other states in 2024, with Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida as the top destinations.
As Hughes concluded: “With declining births, with net domestic migration losses, immigration is really the only source of population growth in New Jersey.”
We were surprised to learn that 20% of New Jersey’s international immigrant population (and 5% of the overall population) is undocumented/illegal, likely a consequence of the open-border policies under the Biden administration and New Jersey’s welcoming environment for them. Therefore, although the actual data was not provided, it appears that a substantial portion of New Jersey’s recent overall population growth was due to undocumented/illegal international immigration. We would ask Prof. Hughes to provide the data and eliminate the guesswork. We believe this is something New Jersey citizens would want to know.
The bottom line: Sunlight’s research and the recent population data are not contradictory at all: in 2024, New Jersey lost people and wealth to other states, and its population growth was entirely due to international immigration.