Thank the babies. They seem to be driving the population growth in local counties. And their births last year made up for the people who’ve died and who’ve left the area, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The census numbers show population estimates as of July 1 for each year, up to 2014.
The number of deaths nationwide is rising because of the aging baby boomers, causing deaths to outpace births in Indiana’s most rural counties, said Jerome McKibben, a demographer whom local school districts have hired for several years to help forecast their student numbers.
But urban counties, such as St. Joseph and Elkhart, tend to have more young people and babies, he noted.
McKibben has also observed a net out-migration of population over the past five years. That includes a lot of young adults who graduate from college and move to big cities such as Chicago and Indianapolis and the East and West coasts, McKibben said.
The census numbers in St. Joseph, Elkhart, Marshall and Berrien counties do show a net migration of U.S.-born people out of their counties in 2014 — all numbers that are higher than the foreign-born immigrants who arrived.
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