Subject: KZPG-US-Front: 51% of US Pop. Growth from Immigration! X-Url: news:Pine.SUN.3.91.951103153934.28222H-100000@foxtrot.rahul.net Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="-------------------------------230892433714882" Status: RO *** IMMIGRATION CONTRIBUTES OVER HALF TO U.S. POPULATION GROWTH *** [ Thanks go to The Center for Immigration Studies for providing KZPG subscribers with this report from their fall _Immigration Review_. (NOTE: The full table of contents of the fall _Immigration Review_ and complete subscription details are at the very end.) -- KZPG ed. ] By John Martin, Center for Immigration Studies It is well understood that immigration fuels population growth, but most people are unaware of how great a share it constitutes. The Census Bureau projects that "...almost one-third of the population growth would be caused by net immigration."(1) A significantly different estimate outlined below, which draws on official data, indicates that immigration, both legal and illegal, accounts for over half of overall annual U.S. population increase. Both of these estimates contrast with the public perception of immigrants as only a small share of the U.S. population. A recent Census Bureau report found that the foreign born represented just under nine percent of the entire population in 1994.(2) But if the foreign-born population is so small, how can it have so great an impact on population growth? Is the current rate of newly arriving immigrants so high? Is the fertility rate of immigrants that much higher? The answers to these questions become clearer when it is remembered that the U.S.-born children of immigrants are not counted as part of the foreign-born population, because they are U.S. citizens at birth. If they were included with their foreign-born parents in a calculation of the "foreign stock," as was last done with the 1970 census, the role of immigration in population growth would be easier to understand. Immigrants add directly to the U.S. foreign-born population when they become residents and indirectly when they subsequently have children here. Both are causes of growth in the U.S. population. Although the children of immigrants born in the United States are omitted from the Census Bureau calculation since the 1970 census, including them makes sense, because if the mother had not immigrated to the United States, the child, in most cases, would not have been born here and, therefore, would not have added to our population. The Indirect Contribution The data on the indirect population growth effect of immigrants, i.e., their children born in this country, is not directly available since the Census Bureau stopped asking about country of birth of parents in the 1980 census. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this information is not available in any other officially collected data at the national level. However, California collects information on the mother's country of birth, and from those data an estimate for the national level may be extrapolated. The California data indicate whether the mother was U.S. born, Mexican born or other foreign born. In 1993, foreign-born mothers gave birth to 261,670 of California's 584,480 babies. These data ignore nationality of the father, so they include a child whose mother is an immigrant and whose father is native born, but omit children whose father is an immigrant and whose mother is native born. This years' Census Bureau report on the foreign born put California's immigrant population at 34.2 percent of the national total in 1994 (see Table 1). If immigrants in the rest of the country had children at the same rate as California's foreign born (i.e, extrapolating by dividing the 262,000 1993 California births by 34.2%) the number of babies born nationwide to immigrants would be about 766,000. This estimate may be high for various reasons, such as differences in national origin or age composition between the California foreign-born population and that of the nation as a whole and the possibility that California has more non-resident foreigners giving birth than elsewhere in the country. But because California accounts for such a large share of the foreign-born population, it should not be too far off target. However, for this analysis, we will decrease the estimate to a conservative 725,000 births nationwide to immigrant women. ___________________________ Table 1 U.S. and California Population and Births (Thousands) Population U.S. Calif. Calif. Share --------------- ------------- ------- ------------ Overall ('94) 260,711 32,231 12.4% Foreign Born ('94) 22,568 7,718 34.2% Births -------------- Overall ('93) 3,988 584 14.6% Foreign Born ('93)* 766 262 34.2% * U.S. foreign-born births extrapolated from california data Sources: Census Bureau, U.S. and California population data ____________________________ The Direct Contribution The flow of new legal immigrants has averaged about 770,000 each year over the past five years. This level of immigration does not take into consideration the flow of earlier illegal immigrants who were allowed to become legal residents through the amnesty provision adopted in 1986, nor additional thousands who became residents outside of the formal immigration system, such as by requesting asylum, so we will increase the number to 800,000 for this estimate. To compare these new residents from abroad with net population growth, the new arrivals must be offset by immigrants who leave the United States (emigrate) and who die. Offsetting these new legal immigrants are emigration and deaths among the foreign born, which, for purposes of this calculation, we estimate at 160,000 and 250,000 respectively -- slightly less than for the general population. Finally, we add the Center's conservative estimate of 300,000 net illegal mmigrants. This results in an estimate of immigration's direct contribution to population increase of about 690,000 per annum. Overall Immigrant Share of Population Growth Adding the direct flow of 690,000 new immigrants per year to the estimated 725,000 births to foreign-born mothers, we arrive at a total of 1,415,000 new immigrant-related residents annually (see Table 2). The Census Bureau estimates that the U.S. population grew by 2,784,000 in 1993. When the annual change in population related to immigration is compared with estimated total annual change, the overall share of annual population increase attributable to immigration is 51 percent -- over half of all population growth. ____________________________________ Table 2 Immigration's Direct and Indirect Effects on Net Population Growth (Thousands) Indirect Impact --------------------- Immigrants Births 725,000 Direct Impacts --------------------- Legal Immigration 800.000 Deaths -250,000 Emigration -160,000 Net Illegal Immigration 300,000 --------------------------------------- Total Direct 690,000 --------------------------------------- Total Direct and Indirect 1,415,000 _______________________________________ Thus, this majority share of population growth is due to both the current high level immigration and births to immigrant women. The data from California also show that the fertility rate of immigrants is higher than for the native born. Births to the foreign-born women in California, compared with the overall foreign-born population in the state, provides a ratio of 3.4:100. For the entire California population, the ration is 1.8:100. And for the nation, the ratio is 1.5:100. Another comparison that demonstrates this point may be made by factoring out the foreign-born population size and birth data for both California and the nation; then California's rate becomes 1.31:100, and the national rate is a much closer 1.35:100. Implications The fact that so much of population growth results from the indirect effect of immigration helps to explain why major immigrant-receiving countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia have much higher rates of annual natural population growth (i.e., without including the direct flows of immigration and emigration) than other industrialized countries. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the rates of natural population growth in the United States, Canada and Australia are 0.7 percent, 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent respectively, while that of Western Europe is 0.1 percent and of Japan, 0.3 percent. Whether rapid population growth, driven by mass immigration, is harmful or beneficial depends on a separate series of considerations, such as the economic and fiscal costs and issues related to impact on quality-of-life. These latter issues include hard-to-quantify effects, such as the consumption of non-renewable resources, pollution and crowding. The above calculation of the immigrant-related share of population growth does not attempt to answer these questions. It does, however, make it obvious that efforts to stabilize our population size because of resource and environmental concerns will miss the target if they do not focus on the need to reduce both illegal and legal immigration. -- John Martin NOTES 1 Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P25-1104, October 1993, p.vii. 2 The Census Bureau report, "The Foreign-Born Population: 1994," shows a 14 percent jump in the foreign-born population over the past four years, taking it to 8.7 percent of the total U.S. population. =================================== Immigration Review, No. 23, Fall 1995 *Table of Contents* * Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 65 Immigration Act * The Politics and Demographics of Immigration Reform * Immigration Contributes Over Half of U.S. Population Growth * New Center Publications * FYI * Capital Currents * Book Reviews/Letters: _Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster_, by Peter Brimelow, reviewed by Otis Graham, * Immigration Reading. [~17 pages total ? - kzpg] =================================== SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: Here are the table of contents and one of the articles from the new issue of _Immigration Review_, the quarterly publication of the Center for Immigration Studies. An annual subscription is $16. Contact me *directly* (NOT by using the _reply_ command in your mail reader) at msk@cis.org if you want more information. -- Mark Krikorian Mark Krikorian, executive director Center for Immigration Studies 1815 H St. N.W., Suite 1010, Washington, DC 20006 (202) 466-8185 (phone); (202) 466-8076 (fax); msk@cis.org ______________________________________________________________________ *** KZPG: broadcasting population related news and views *** Send news, commentary and subscription requests to KZPG@iti.com. Views broadcast don't necessarily represent the views of KZPG or its staff. Not affiliated with ZPG Inc. Equal time given for controversial issues. 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