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People enjoy the shops and restaurants in downtown Morristown, NJ.

(Frances Micklow/The Star-Ledger)

New Jersey residents are fleeing the state in droves, but the loss is primarily being offset by a continued influx of immigrants from other countries, without which the state's population would be declining precipitously.

Between 2013 and 2014, New Jersey lost at least 55,000 residents who left for other states, the continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades as people flee the state to retire, to seek a lower-cost of living and jobs in places that have been quicker to recover from the recession.

But in the same span, more than 51,000 people have moved to the Garden State from other countries, at the same time reshaping the state's population and stabilizing its slow growth.

It's the same thing that has spurred the state's massive growth in the early part of the 20th century, but today, it's preventing an exodus.

"This is really what we'd call a demographic long wave," said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. It's been going on for a long time and it will continue to go on. The result is a sustained increase in diversity and population."

The new figures were released Thursday as part of the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, one of several annual surveys conducted by the federal agency between decennial population counts to measure population trends.

The data also show that New Jersey is becoming a more urbanized population. Counties with firm access to New York City in particular are showing major gains, while rural counties like Sussex, Cape May and Hunterdon have lost population.

While in its infancy, the urban trend revealed in the data could end up having far more dramatic consequences for New Jersey. Experts say is the beginning of a contraction of the suburban sprawl that has dominated the state's population growth more than half a century.

"This is further evidence that a new trend is emerging. The perimeter is starting to contract and this is really a counter to a 65-year trend," Hughes said.

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The urbanization of New Jersey is a symptom of the transition between the Baby Boomer generation and the Millennials. The younger generation is coming to dominate the workforce and is seeking out different things from their parents, he said.

Where spacious homes and abundant yards were the apple of the Baby Boomer's eye, walkable-downtowns and ample public transit to cities are now far-more desired by the younger set, Hughes said.

"We're going through the greatest age-structure transformation in history," he said.

Hudson County, for example, has grown by more than 34,000 people since 2010 while Sussex County lost nearly 4,000. Fifty years ago, those trends were the polar opposite, as people longed for more space and the house with the white picket fence became cemented in the American psyche.

"It's a potential threshold change," Joseph Seneca, a co-author of a study on the topic and professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, told NJ Advance Media in the fall. "And it carries a great deal of implications."

A few counties buck the trends, however.

Ocean County, for example, is one of only two that saw an increase in people from other parts New Jersey and the United States moving in from 2013 and 2014, gaining more than 1,000 new domestic residents over that span. Conversely, Camden County has lost more than 4,000 residents in just a year, but is not pulling in the same international population as other parts of the state.

The annual data update from the Census shows just incremental change, but those changes are part of a larger set of trends that is expected to completely remake the fabric of the state in the coming years and decades.

Should such trends continue, it could have major impacts on the state's economy, infrastructure and real estate markets.

Consider:

* New Jersey recently became one of the few states in the country where the majority of the young adult population is made up of minorities.

* The popularity of older, urbanized communities in New Jersey like Morristown, with walkable town centers and access to mass transit, is booming, while newer towns that rose with suburban sprawl, are struggling.

* Many of the state's largest companies are abandoning the sprawling office parks built in the 1970s and 1980s in favor of more urbanized environments, leaving towns in suburbia with millions of square feet of office space they are struggling to fill.

* Younger couples in New Jersey are gravitating toward urbanized apartment living and pushing off marriage and children longer than their parents.

How New Jersey's Population is Shifting