WORLD POPULATION DAY: US to Hit Demographic Milestone at 300 Million

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 11 2006 (IPS) – With a significant increase in the flow of migrants both legal and illegal over the last few years, the United States is heading towards a demographic milestone: a 300 million population before the end of this year, rising from its current 298 million.
This increase is largely a result of immigration which accounts for four of every 10 people added to the United States every year, says Lawrence Smith Jr., president of the Washington-based Population Institute.

The United States is now the world s third most populous nation, behind only China and India, with 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion people, respectively. Only two other industrialised nations appear among the world s 10 most populous countries: Russia (143 million people), in seventh place, and Japan (128 million), in tenth.

Besides India, the other five developing nations in the top 10 are: Indonesia (223 million), Brazil (186 million), Pakistan (158 million), Bangladesh (142 million) and Nigeria (132 million).

By the middle of this century, the United States is projected to remain as the third most populous country with a population projected as high as 450 million, but it will be the only industrialised nation on the list of 10 most populous, Smith told IPS.

According to USA Today, the United States is alone among industrialised nations in its relatively rapid population increase. The populations in Japan and Russia, the paper said, are expected to shrink almost one-fourth by 2050.
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Germany, Italy and most European nations are not making enough babies to keep their populations from sliding, it added.

Smith said the process of reaching a fair and equitable U.S. immigration policy has been complicated by the value of remittances immigrants send back to their countries of origin.

He pointed out that remittances, largely from Mexicans living and working in the United States, amount to some 18 billion dollars, the second largest source of revenue, trailing only oil.

The value of these remittances to the economies of Latin American countries makes it doubtful that their governments would seriously cooperate with a more stringent U.S. immigration policy, he added.

In a report released last May on international migration and development, the United Nations said that international migrants numbered 191 million in 2005, of which 115 million lived in industrial nations and 75 million in developing countries.

Three-quarters of all migrants lived in just 28 countries in 2005, with one in every five migrants living in the United States. According to the study, the number of migrants entering the United States rose from 23.3 million in 1990 to 38.4 million in 2005.

The United States held the top spot among countries with the highest numbers of international migrants. Russia was far behind as number two, with 12.1 million migrants in 2005, followed by Germany 10.1 million and Ukraine 6.8 million.

The rise in population in the United States is also expected to trigger a rise in consumption, in what is described as a highly consumer-oriented economy, threatening environmental problems.

Smith pointed out that while the United States has a mere five percent of the world s population, it accounts for 24 percent of the world s energy consumption and a quarter of its fossil fuel consumption.

The United States produces 72 percent of the world s hazardous waste, he said, yet, environmental protection legislation ignites heated debate rather than consensus in the U.S. Congress, and international agreements to combat global warming bring ringing denouncements or mere shrugging off of the best available science as non-conclusive.

Environmental groups have pointed out that the average consumption rate of a family of four in the United States is estimated at five or 10 times more than an average poor family of about eight in a developing country.

According to the U.N. study, international migration has also played an important role in depopulation of cities in industrial nations such as the United States, and revamping housing markets.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the movement of natives to the suburbs slowed down population growth in the cities in many industrial nations, giving rise to a trend known as counter-urbanisation.

But in the 1980s, counter-urbanisation ceased, partly because of the growing number of international migrants settling in the core of big cities.

In 2000, immigration was identified as one of the two most powerful demographic trends re-shaping American cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington DC.

In New York, the proportion of foreign-born increased from 28 percent in 1990 to 40 percent in 2000. Furthermore, specific migrant groups have carved residential niches in previously poor neighbourhoods, and have made them into thriving communities, the study said.