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The new data shows that, much more than in the first pandemic year, domestic migration led to greater losses or reduced gains in most of the nation’s biggest metro areas, as well as their core urban counties. was most instrumental in accentuating or softening the impact of slower national growth in particular areas. Because those demographic components affected most parts of the nation, migration within the U.S. These shifts occurred during a year in which the nation registered its lowest population growth (0.1%) in at least 120 years, due to sharply reduced immigration from abroad and much lower levels of natural increase (the excess of births over deaths). At the same time, smaller metro areas, as a group, experienced higher population growth than in each of the previous two years, while non-metropolitan America showed the greatest annual population gain in more than a decade. These estimates-for the period Jto July 1, 2021-reveal an absolute decline in the aggregate size of the nation’s 56 major metropolitan areas (those with populations exceeding 1 million). Census Bureau population estimates emphasize that it was domestic out-migration that exerted an outsized demographic impact on large metropolitan areas during the prime 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.