The United States' population grew in the past decade at its slowest rate since the Great Depression as Americans left industrial regions hard hit by recession, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The long-awaited census handed seats in Congress from states that supported President Barack Obama to fast-expanding southern and western states that mostly support the rival Republican Party -- chief among them, Texas.
Releasing the first data from the survey required every 10 years under the Constitution, the Census Bureau put the US population at 308,745,538 as of April 1, 2010.
The population of the world's largest economy rose 9.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, the slowest rate since the 1930s when the figure was 7.3 percent.
Census chief Robert Groves, presenting the findings at a news conference, described the 2000s as one of two low points for population growth in the past century but was cautious about pinning the blame on the recession.
Groves noted that most fellow wealthy nations are producing fewer children -- with some such as Japan and Germany experiencing declines in their overall populations.
"This is a pattern that is a worldwide pattern," Groves said.
"So part of it is that and part of it might be the recession. We'll never really be able to piece those things apart," he said.
Groves said about 60 percent of US population growth came from newborns and another 40 percent from immigration. Unlike in the past decade, the United States tightly restricted immigration during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The Census results are likely to reinvigorate the intense US debate about immigration. Advocates for more legal immigration have argued that the United States can accommodate more residents, particularly those with family connections or who offer special skills vital for the 21st-century economy.
But political momentum has shifted away from immigration reforms, with Republicans in the Senate last week defeating a proposal backed by Obama that would offer a pathway to citizenship for young people illegally in the United States if they attend university or enter the military.
The Census Bureau will later release a range of other statistics such as ethnicity. Groves said that the population count included illegal immigrants in the United States.
The data showed that, for the first time in history, more people lived in the sunny American West than in the largely industrial and agricultural Midwest.
The fastest-growing state was Nevada, home to the gambling and entertainment haven Las Vegas. Nevada grew by 35.1 percent, even though its housing market has been one of the most severely hit in the economic downturn.
The only state that lost people was Michigan, which includes the devastated motor city of Detroit. Its population slipped 0.6 percent. Puerto Rico, a self-governing US commonwealth, also lost population, dropping 2.2 percent.
The census is used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives -- and, by correlation, each state's power in electing the president.
Texas, where the Republican Party dominates, picked up four seats to have 36 in the House -- second only to California, which stayed steady at 53 seats.
Other states that gained seats included Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Utah and -- almost alone among states seen as reliably Democratic -- Washington state.
States that lost seats included the Democratic bastions of Massachusetts, Michigan and New York, as well as industrial swing states Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In one stark reversal, the population of Washington, DC, grew by 5.2 percent to almost 602,000 people -- its first growth since the 1950s as the capital increasingly draws young professionals.
However, the city has no voting representative in Congress under the Constitution, even though one state -- Wyoming -- had a smaller population.
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