I'm sure your first thought in reading that headline is " and all 22-thousand of these people are in front of me on the highway and none of them know how to use a turn signal".

Holiday  traffic and crowded shopping malls aside, our new resident numbers over the past year actually translates into a net loss of citizens.The Census is a government bureau, let me explain how they take more people and make them less people.

The 22-thousand new residents from July of 2014 to July of 2015 are attributed to two things. An increase in births compared to deaths across the state and an increase in citizens from foreign countries.

The only gain in migration that Louisiana had was almost 8,300 more international in-migrants.

Those are the words of Elliot Stonecipher. He is a demographer and he made those comments to the Louisiana Radio Network.

So how do you gain people but lose population? According to Stonecipher the outbound migration of people from the state was actually 74-hundred people more than this new resident figure represents. Most of that outbound migration had to do with one thing, jobs.

The big thing next year will be how much out-migration is happening because of the loss of jobs in the oil and gas industry.

The population of Louisiana was estimated to be  4.6 million according to the 2010 Census report.  The complete census of the each state is taken every ten years.

 

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