Though running behind by about four months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 U.S. Census was officially released Thursday, Aug. 12, showing that not only the state of Oregon, but most of its counties, are continuing to thrive, according to Charles Rynerson with the Population Research Center at Portland State University.

Every county except one in the state of Oregon has seen a population increase over the past decade. In 2010, Baker County had about 16,134 people within its confines.

The 2020 census marks the population at 16,668, seeing a 3.3% increase of people that call this region home.

“Relative to the rest of the nation, (the fact that) Oregon’s predominantly rural counties are not losing as much is relevant. Oregon has attracted more migration than most states, and that’s going to continue,” Rynerson said.

To see that population is increasing is interesting because Rynerson was quick to note that as a whole, Oregon reported more deaths than births in the last 10 years.

“That was true in the majority of counties. There were more deaths than births due to aging populations and low birth rates,” Rynerson said. “That’s only going to accelerate. So in order to save off loss those counties will be expected to attract more people moving in than out.”

A contributing factor in why births are lower than deaths is that populations are seeing birth rates plunge among different categories as more women are focused on building a family at a later age unlike decades before.

“If you look at the teen and the early twenties birth rates, those have just plunged beyond belief. They are the lowest it’s ever been in the history of the U.S., and I think that’s generally a good thing. People understand the difficulty of having a child at a very young age, and even up to age 30, there are far fewer births to women under 30 than there were in the past,” Rynerson said.

Oftentimes residents who migrated from other states to Oregon are those that are on the search for economic opportunity and are a part of the working age population, but it doesn’t correlate with the birth rate in counties, let alone states.

“The warehouse industry, the junction between I-84 and I-82, and the ports among Umatilla and Morrow counties, that has given the counties real economic advantages that have attracted workers over the last few decades,” Rynerson said. “In the long term, Oregon is going to grow if we keep attracting people from other states and countries, but we aren’t going to continue to grow from births.”

The Census date was originally scheduled for April of 2020, but with the COVID-19 pandemic making its mark just one month earlier, the numbers were only briefly disrupted, which mainly only reflected on college towns, but saw higher participation as a whole compared to the 2010 census.

“A lot of students went home before census day, and there was a big concern over data collection that I think the real economic impact of the pandemic won’t be showing up in these 2020 numbers because of when the census was done, and the census was very happy with the completeness of the data collection. They had more time to do it, there was a higher self-response rate in 2020 than in 2010 statewide,” Rynerson said.

Though it’s easy to misconceive that the pandemic can raise the birth rate due to the lockdown, Rynerson was quick to point out that the complete opposite was true.

“People don’t want to be having a child when the hospitals are overcrowded, and they can’t go anywhere or do anything, so the pandemic had a bigger effect on birth rates in the long run than death rates,” Rynerson said.

The biggest surprise for Rynerson was in race and ethnicity.

Since people are able to mark more than one race when they are filling out their census, the percentages of people who solely marked white’s percentages actually dropped, barely increasing by about 30,000.

“The reason that white alone fell was because fewer hispanics, when they got to the race question, which is a separate question, fewer identified as white alone and many, many more identified as white and some other race,” Rynerson said. “There’s a growing realization because it’s become standard on all kinds of questionnaires and federal data collection. Ten years ago it was kind of new to people that they can write in multiple ethnic, ancestry, racial identities, (but) now it’s kind of more well known that is something that you can do, so people took advantage of it.”

Ultimately, for those who aren’t too knowledgeable on what the Census is able to accomplish, it provides government funding to towns big or small to assist them in their day-to-day operations, so all it would cost a resident is their time.

“It’s really important. The state of Oregon overall, some of it goes to the state in general, but some of it goes to communities,” Rynerson said. “The per capita revenue that cities get is based on population. Anybody that’s not counted means fewer dollars in their communities.”

Census questionnaires are often filled out online, but in different communities where internet use is sparse, these questionnaires are expected to be mailed back to the returning address.

For more information on the 2020 Census, go to https://www.census.gov/en.html.