I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. This is a weekend special.

The biggest story to me from the 2020 census numbers that came out this week was not that New York and California and a few other

states each lost a seat in Congress or that Florida gained one and Texas gained two and a few

others gained one. Those things matter. They may actually matter to the control of Congress,

so it's really big in that respect. But as a census matter, they are incremental,

and all those states grew in population. The biggest story from the census to me was how many

people left Puerto Rico. The population of Puerto Rico now is 400,000 people fewer than it was in 2010.

The island lost a whopping 12% of its population.

No place else comes close.

Only two states lost population at all.

West Virginia declined by 3%, Illinois by just one-tenth of 1%.

So Puerto Rico losing 12% of its population over the last decade is in a class by itself.

So what happened?

And what does this exodus mean that Puerto Rico needs?

And back with us now is Alana Kassanova Burgess, host of the WNYC and Futuro Studios podcast LaBrega

and on the media producer.

Hi, Alana, welcome back to the show.

Hi, Brian, good morning.

I guess I should ask first, do you have reason to believe that this census count is accurate?

That's a good question. I mean, there was a problem with the process in Puerto Rico

for a while.

It seemed like only 30% of homes had responded.

...