The island's own numbers show where the people are - and where they went. Puerto Rico has lost population nearly every year since 2005. In July 2025, for the first time since the 1980 Census, fewer than 3.2 million people lived on the island.^[6] The components of that loss are not mysterious: between July 2024 and June 2025, 32,857 people died and 17,950 were born - deaths nearly twice births - and net migration, which had briefly turned positive, flipped back to a loss of 2,779.^[1][6] A place does not shrink for one reason; Puerto Rico is shrinking from both ends at once. The births number deserves its own sentence of attention. Puerto Rico recorded 18,039 births in 2024 - preliminary figures suggest roughly 16,400 in 2025, which would be the lowest since record-keeping began in 1888.^[7] The demographic registry's series reads like a slow leak: 19,144 (2020), 19,375 (2021), 19,169 (2022), 18,657 (2023), 18,039 (2024). Behind each number is a school classroom that will never fill, a youth baseball league short two teams, a first-grade class merged into another. This is the arithmetic the column keeps returning to: no policy that ignores the cradle can hold the population. The diaspora is the other half of the ledger - and the half nobody counts as opportunity. The Puerto Rican-origin population in the 50 states and D.C. grew 71 percent between 2000 and 2021, from 3.4 million to 5.8 million. The subset actually born on the island grew too - 25 percent, from 1.3 million to 1.6 million - which means the stateside Puerto Rican population is now larger than the island's entire remaining population, and much of it arrived recently enough to remember the island as home rather than as heritage.^[8] They are concentrated in Florida (21 percent), New York (17 percent), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (8 percent each) - corridors a one-hour flight from San Juan.^[2] What happens to the people who leave was visible this year in the island's schoolrooms. Enrollment in public schools fell 44 percent between 2006 and 2018, from 544,138 students to 306,652;^[9] the Department of Education closed 263 schools in a single wave before the 2018-19 school year, and a recent study found roughly 650 schools operating below 70 percent of capacity. In the town of Guánica, ten schools have closed since 2010. Each closure is a bus route that stops existing, a neighborhood anchor that becomes a fenced building, a family's reason to stay that quietly disappears. Now the part the debate gets wrong. The argument treats Act 60 as one door with one clientele - wealthy newcomers. The record says otherwise. From 2012 through 2024, Puerto Rico granted 5,852 resident investor decrees (the chapter that covers newcomers) - and 3,899 export services decrees, the chapter any Puerto Rican business can use, where self-employed islanders and Puerto Rican entrepreneurs are the fastest-growing applicants. A federal watchdog counted a majority of those investor decrees arriving from California, then Florida, New York and Texas. The GAO found the economic effects of both chapters are, in its words, difficult to isolate - the evidence on costs and benefits is mixed. That ambiguity is exactly why the column argues chapter by chapter rather than slogan by slogan: the same code that a California financier uses to exempt his capital gains is open to a Caguas software shop exporting services, at a 4 percent rate, with a 15-year decree. And the migration story is not uniform - which means it is not destiny. Forty-six of the island's 78 municipios gained people in 2023.^[3] Guaynabo (+495), Bayamón (+389) and Isabela (+305) led the gains; Ponce (−1,050), Toa Baja (−375) and Guayama (−289) led the losses.^[4][5] Places on this island are already attracting people. The question the next decade answers is whether the policy toolkit - the incentives code, the remote-work economy, the cost-of-living gap with the states - gets aimed at the 5.8 million people who already love this island, before another 250,000 desks sit empty in its schools.^[9] The diaspora is the island's largest untapped supply of residents and founders. The tool is in place. The only missing piece is the decision to use it.