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Governor John P. de Jongh, Jr. has reviewed the recently released 2010 U.S. Census results, which show a slightly decreasing population for the Virgin Islands.
“Once a decade, the U.S. Census provides a fascinating account of our islands’ changing demographics and an invaluable snapshot of our territory’s population distribution. I want to commend everybody who assisted the U.S. Census Bureau in making the 2010 Census a resounding success,” de Jongh said.
The population of the Virgin Islands now stands at 106,405 residents, a drop of two percent from the previous decade, according to the census results.
Last year, 50,601 people were recorded living on St. Croix, 2,633 less than there were during the 2000 census. The population of St. Thomas rose by 453 people to 51,634, and St. John lost 27 people, for a total population of 4,170.
Our towns of Charlotte Amalie and Christiansted each shrunk a bit, with 10,354 and 2,433 residents respectively in 2010. Frederiksted town picked up 127 residents for a 2010 population of 859 people.
There are several factors that account for the declining population of the Virgin Islands. The territory has seen a dramatic decrease in its birth rate since the 1970s. In part, the declining number of births was an expected reflection of a demographic transition characteristic of greater economic success and a higher standard of living.
The tremendous population growth that characterized the 1960s and 1970s was mostly the result of streams of immigrants coming to the shores of the Virgin Islands. That trend has been reversed in the past decade, partly a result of greater border vigilance in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
For decades, statistics were not available on the numbers of Virgin Islanders who migrated to the U.S. mainland. With the results of a recent survey, however, we can begin to assess those trends. In all, 63,629 Virgin Islanders in 2009 lived away from the islands, with a quarter of the territory’s natives living in Florida and some 15 percent in New York. From 2008 to 2009, almost 5,000 people born in the territory moved to the U.S. mainland, making clear the outflow of residents to other parts of the country is a major factor to the territory’s declining population.
The Eastern Caribbean Center of the University of the Virgin Islands has for several years been studying the population trends recently brought to attention by the 2010 Census. UVI researchers have particularly been interested in the territory’s decline in fertility since the 1990s—a trend that has resulted in an aging population. Another demographic shift is an increase in the percentage of native-born Virgin Islanders out of the total population—the result of immigrants who swelled the population in previous decades now raising their family’s first generation of VI natives.
ECC researchers have reached several conclusions to explain the decreased birth rate from empirical examinations of social forces in the Virgin Islands and throughout the Caribbean.
One is the increased cost of bearing and raising children. Another is that fewer people these days who are in their prime reproductive years are in stable marital unions, the kinds of relationships in which most childbearing occurs.
Growing economic independence of women also means more woman have practical and viable alternatives to marriage and motherhood. Many women are delaying starting families in favor of advancing their educations and careers. Sometimes those women choose not to risk hard-won professional gains by having children later in life.
Finally, the availability of effective and affordable birth control gives women more reproductive choices. At the same time, the decline of religious authority has taken away the stigma of using contraception or having an abortion.
The administration will continue to assess the impact of the territory’s declining population on federal formula grant programs, many of which use population count as one of the factors in determining how much funds the territory will receive.
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