21-03-2025
Wisconsin hit record migration in '24. Will it last under Trump's immigration policies?
When the Rev. Javier Bustos moved to Milwaukee in 2017, he celebrated just one Spanish-language Mass a week. Today, he says three as pastor of Our Lady Queen of Peace and Blessed Sacrament parishes, on the city's south side.
"Our churches are packed," said Bustos, who is also in charge of Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. "I have seen immigrants of many, many countries, mostly from Latin America, but also Africa, and even some European immigrants."
It's not just Milwaukee.
Migration to Wisconsin reached the highest level in two decades last year, largely spurred by people moving to the state from other countries, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates earlier in March.
Of the more than 28,000 people who moved to Wisconsin between June 2023 and June 2024, more than 22,000 were international migrants. More than 6,000 were domestic migrants — moving to Wisconsin from other states — and slightly more than 2,000 new residents were the result of natural population change, or the number of births minus deaths.
The overall increase is a marked change from Wisconsin's shrinking population during the pandemic.
The looming issue is what's ahead. President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigration — everything from killing refugee programs to revoking protected status for hundreds of thousands of migrants to ranking countries for a potential new travel ban — would slow if not dramatically reverse any gains in population Wisconsin has seen.
The numbers don't exist in a vacuum. Some Wisconsin economists and population experts have argued an influx of immigrants is key to bolstering local economies statewide. Just on Milwaukee's south side, for example, the flow of immigrants has led to new businesses, more traffic to local restaurants and growing school enrollment, Bustos said.
"With the current administration, we are facing challenges and fear of the uncertainty," Bustos said. "Restaurants are feeling the fear, churches are feeling the fear, schools are feeling the fear. Those fears may affect the economy."
Wisconsin's population growth has been part of a nationwide trend of steadily rising migration since the mid-2010s, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past few years, in particular, global unrest has driven people to the U.S. The fall of Kabul and Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to a national influx of refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Biden-era sponsorship of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela also allowed more legal immigrants. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee has become a hub for Burmese refugees from Myanmar.
Between June 30, 2023, and June 30, 2024, the Census Bureau found international migration accounted for 2.8 million of 3.3 million new residents nationally, up from the previous two years. The Bureau's count attempts to include migrants who are in the U.S. both legally and illegally.
Net migration to Wisconsin, which includes both people moving from abroad and from other states, also outpaces most other Midwestern states, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau data by the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Over the past three years, net migration in Wisconsin rose to its highest point since 2004 — a rate second only to South Dakota when compared to 12 other states in the region, said Mark Sommerhauser, communications director for the Policy Forum.
"In recent decades, migration to some of the Southern states and Western states has been quite high, while to the Midwestern and Northeastern states it's been a lot lower," Sommerhauser said. "We're doing pretty well by Midwestern standards when it comes to people migrating to our state."
Wisconsin in particular also is seeing fewer leave, according to Ananth Seshadri, director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Between 2012 and 2016, Wisconsin lost about 8,000 taxpayers a year to other states, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. But, between 2017 and 2020, that number neutralized to about 0 — meaning about the same number of taxpayers moved in as moved out. Seshadri said falling tax rates could be one reason why.
"We still tax our residents more than most of our neighboring states, but the tax structure in Wisconsin is a little more friendly," he said.
Bustos said he's seen what is essentially a combination of international and domestic immigration; families from other countries initially land in another state, such as California or Texas, then settle in Milwaukee for its existing immigrant community.
Referring to the city's south side, he said: "If you're an immigrant in that area, you fit in immediately. People who are coming in benefit from immigrants like myself and many others who've been here for 30 or 40 years."
Though Dane County continues to lead the state in population growth by wide margins, the latest Census Bureau numbers showed Milwaukee County's population grew for the first time in a decade last year.
The county added about 2,880 residents through both migration and new births, bringing its total to just under 925,000 people. Milwaukee County still has lost 15,000 residents since 2020 — the most of any Wisconsin county in that time period, according to Seshadri. However, its international migration numbers were the highest in the state. The county has seen more than 18,000 people move in from other countries in the last five years, compared to about 16,700 in Dane County.
Further, the net number of people leaving Milwaukee has decreased steadily in recent years, going from about 17,000 in 2021 to about 6,000 last year. Those numbers indicate "a real improvement," immigrants from other countries will still be critical to continue growing Milwaukee's population and economy, according to John D. Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
"If we see a decline in the population from immigration, you'll see fewer kids in schools, less funding for those schools, and prices for all different kinds of things will go up as there's labor shortages," Johnson said.
All of this comes as natural population growth continues shrinking, both nationwide and in Wisconsin.
For more than a decade after 2004, the last year analyzed by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, natural population change was the main driver of population growth in Wisconsin. But in 2018, migration started exceeding natural population change and, by 2024, migration was a whopping 14 times higher than natural population change.
That's because the Baby Boomer population is beginning to die while the country continues to experience a decades-long plummet in birth rates. The first three years of the 2020s each set records for the lowest number of births in Milwaukee, according to Marquette's Milwaukee Area Project.
"Fewer babies are being born," Sommerhauser said, "and, at the same time, we have this big cohort of people in their 60s and 70s, the Baby Boomer generation, that are just reaching that stage of life."
As a candidate, Trump pledged to crack down on illegal immigration as a means to reduce crime in the U.S. However, his administration's actions have broadly targeted immigrants and refugees, legal and illegal.
The effects will be widespread, according to Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit advocacy group for immigrants.
Immigrants make up about 14% of the U.S. population, but more than 18% of the workforce, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Healthcare, education, technology, hospitality and agriculture — including Wisconsin's dairy industry — all rely on immigrant labor, documented and undocumented. A drastic decline in immigration could have "a really negative impact on the economy," Murray said.
"We were already kind of in a pressure cooker just waiting for a recession," Murray said. "We have this all-time low birth rate, we have almost 10 million open jobs available every month, so that means we don't have the workers to fill the roles that we need to remain globally competitive."
In addition to filling labor shortages, immigrants can bring skill sets to bolster existing institutions, Seshadri said.
"If you go to any major research university, like UW-Madison, immigration is a really important factor in terms of the lifeblood of the place," he said.
On Milwaukee's south side, Bustos said he's been proud to see the city welcome immigrants, and he hopes the trend will continue despite new national policies.
"These are people who are coming in with real reasons to migrate from situations that are difficult in their country of origin," the Catholic priest said. "They come into the city of Milwaukee, and as soon as they get here, they start looking for jobs and start working for the community."
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin sees record migration as Trump cracks down on immigration
