Under the current immigration law and enforcement regime, the United States is experiencing a higher rate of immigration, legal plus illegal, than ever before, and that is driving a large increase in population. In 2005 our population was 296 million. Passel and Cohn (2008 – full references at the end) forecast an increase to 438 million in 2050 (the Census Bureau (2008) predicts 439 million). Of the 48% increase from 2005 to 2050, 82% will be due to immigrants who arrive during that period and the descendants of those immigrants. And, our increasingly crowded nation is already the third most populous on earth.
Even though people sense that current immigration rates are high, we naturally assume that they must be much smaller as a fraction of total population than in the other major immigration wave in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. However, even on a fractional basis, current immigration rates are approaching the earlier figures, and the results are the same. Census figures (Passel and Cohn , 2008) show that in 1890, 14.8% of the U.S. population was foreign born, the largest percentage in our history. In 1970 it was only 4.7%, but by 2007 it had risen to 12.6% (Camarota, 2007), the highest it’s been in 80 years, and it’s still increasing. Passel and Cohn (2008) project that under current trends the previous high percentage of foreign born will be exceeded in 2023, and it will be 19% in 2050.
It is tempting to see our rapid population increase as an inevitable result of world population growth, but that too is a misconception. The Population Reference Bureau (2009) reports that from 2009 to 2050 the U.S. population will grow by 43%. Canada, which accepts many immigrants, albeit more selectively, will grow by 24%. Latin America and the Caribbean, with generally higher birth rates than ours, will grow by 25%. The population of Mexico will grow only 18%, by virtue of continuing emigration to the United States. The population of Europe will actually decrease by 5% and Japan by 25%. The populations of China and Russia, our only credible potential military adversaries, will change by +8% and -18%, respectively. The world is not driving our population increase, nor are security concerns.
Immigration rates and enforcement of immigration law are entirely at the discretion of Congress and the President, and significant and repeated changes have been made since 1965. In the early 1960s, and for many decades before, we received 300,000 or fewer immigrants per year, almost all legal (Camarota, 2007). Now we receive about 1.1 million legal (Department of Homeland Security, 2008) and an average of 500,000 illegal immigrants per year (Camarota, 2007).
Since the change in immigration law in 1965, most immigrants have come from Third World countries, and thus have minority status on arrival. Through some very convoluted logic this has made it politically incorrect to discuss reduction of immigration rates or even to suggest that they should not be increased. Liberal doctrine now advocates increased immigration and reduced enforcement of immigration law, placing the interests of foreign nationals above concerns about quality of life and standard of living in this country. Business Republicans side with liberals in order to provide cheap labor for their wealthy clients. The environmental movement, which had long advocated population stabilization, has found it politically expedient to abandon the issue.
We need a common sense discussion of immigration that places the interests of the American people above ethnic politics, business desires, and ethereal fantasies of a borderless world. We need to move beyond an exclusive focus on the emotional issue of illegal immigration to consider immigration policy more rationally and broadly. We should consider coupling amnesty and much tougher enforcement in the future with a large reduction in legal immigration, and we should act soon. Even if immigration were reduced immediately to more traditional levels, rapid population growth would continue for decades. A report by the National Research Council (1997) found that had there been no immigration after 1995, U.S. population would have peaked at 310 million in 2040, then slowly declined. Our population will reach 310 million in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau, 6/15/09).
For additional aspects of the immigration issue see IowaPopulist’s blog.
REFERENCES
Jeffrey S. Passel and D'Vera Cohn, February 11, 2008. U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050. Pew Hispanic Center, Pew Research Center, www.pewresearch.org. You should be able to access the report at http://pewresearch.org/... or go to the web site, click 'publications index', then 'reports' then scroll down by date
Census Bureau, 2008. Press Release for 2008 Population Press Release for 2008 Population Projections, Aug. 14, 2008, http://www.census.gov/...
Camarota, 2007. "Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A Profile of America’s Foreign-Born Population," by Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. http://www.cis.org/...
Population Reference Bureau, 2009 World Population Data Sheet http://www.prb.org/...
Department of Homeland Security. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2008. Table 1: Persons Obtaining Legal Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2008. http://www.dhs.gov/...
National Research Council, 1997, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. J.P. Smith and B. Edmonston (eds.), p. 95
U.S. Census Bureau 6/15/09. Home page http://www.census.gov/ gives current U.S. population as 306.7 million. Our population currently grows about 1%/yr., at which rate it will reach 310 million in 2010.