From New York Times, I'm Michael Vabaro. This is a day.

A few days ago, the US government revealed that the country's population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century.

Today, a state-herndon spoke with our colleague, Sabrina Tevernese, about why that is,

and just how profoundly it could shape America's future.

It's Tuesday, May 4th.

So Sabrina, when the US government finished counting the American people this time in the census,

it found that the American population was growing really slowly.

That was a bit surprising to me personally. What's going on here?

So this is a very interesting and relatively new thing for the United States.

We have this extremely slow population increase, which is different for the United States.

The United States usually grows really quickly.

What we saw with the census data was the second slowest decade for population growth in American history.

That is, since 1790, when the United States government started taking the census.

So that's really surprising. We had known that there was some slowdown for some time,

but this census data really tells us this is really the new normal in the United States.

So population is growing at a slower rate. How do we explain this?

So instead, there are two forces that make up population growth.

One is immigration, and the other is births. Then of course there are deaths.

So you put all of these things together, and that's what makes a population grow.

And so for the past decade or so, we've seen a real slowdown in immigration.

And there are a number of reasons for that. A lot fewer people coming from Mexico.

That's in part because the Mexican economy is a bit better.

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