2002 Yearend: World 6.26 billion people
(Part of UPI's Special series of Reports
reviewing 2002 and previewing 2003)
By Steve Sailer,
UPI National Correspondent
LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- The global demographic story of recent years has been the rapid fall in birthrates. Even in the developing countries, total fertility is down from 6 babies per woman in 1960 to 2.9 today.
"Demographic momentum," however, means that even after birthrates fall to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman over the course of her life, the population keeps growing while women from the bigger families prevalent in the past are still having their babies.
While stabilization of the world's population (currently 6.261 billion) remains many decades off, most demographers now are at least confident that it is coming.
In contrast, American population growth shows no signs of slowing down. According to the Census Bureau, the United States' resident population is now nearly 289 million. That's up from 281 million when the Census was taken in April of 2000. That implies a growth rate of close to 1 percent per year, somewhat higher than China (0.7 percent) and a little below Iran (1.2 percent).
In January 2000, the Census Bureau issued a long-term forecast, predicting that the American population, under the most likely circumstances, would hit 404 million in 2050 and 571 million by 2100. Yet when the new projections -- the first to use the Census 2000 data -- come out next spring, they are likely to be higher.
Until the 2000 Census numbers were tabulated, the government didn't realize it was underestimating the current population by six million (many of that number being illegal immigrants). Also, the population appears to have been growing slightly faster than expected since 2000.
While the 2000 projections are obsolete, they still provide a useful framework for thinking about American demographics.
The Census also issued low and high series projections, which vary from a forecasted population at the end of this century of only 283 million up to a staggering 1.182 billion, which would be considerably higher than the current population of India.
This remarkable range depends on estimates of the factors that affect the size of the population, such as how long people tend to live. Over the past decade, the average life expectancy rose by about two years to 77. The Census doesn't expect any major breakthroughs in lifespan over the next century, with its range of guesses for 2100 running from age 85 to age 92. Of course, hard-to-predict scientific breakthroughs or global catastrophes could severely alter those cautious projections.
Future birthrates are notoriously hard to predict. Demographers generally subscribe to the comforting assumption that all total fertility rates will eventually even out at the population stabilizing replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. There isn't all that much evidence for this belief, however, as shown by the plummeting of European birth rates (which are now at only 1.2 babies per woman in Catholic Spain and Italy).
In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black, Asian, and American Indian women all are having babies at about the replacement rate. Non-Hispanic white women are a little under that mark (1.87 in 2001). Hispanics, however, reached a fertility level of 3.16 children per woman in 2001, their highest level since the CDC began counting in 1989. Interestingly, Mexican-American women now have a higher birthrate than Mexican women.
With the Hispanic share of the population growing, the whole country crossed the replacement level fertility rate in 2000 for the first time since 1971.
Divergent guesses
The total number of births in America fell by less than 1 percent from 2000 to 2001, perhaps due to the cooling off of the economy.
The number of white and black babies was down while the number of Hispanic babies was up 4 percent. Hispanics comprised 21 percent of all newborns, up from 14 percent in 1989.
Much of the difference among the Census Bureau's low, medium, and high long-run population projections stems from divergent guesses about future political decisions on immigration. The medium projection assumes that net migration stays at around 1 million per year. The low projection assumes that immigration is cut back until only slightly more foreigners are immigrating as Americans are emigrating. The high projection assumes the numbers of immigrants allowed to enter grows, although not quite as quickly as the population.
Significant baby boom
During the 2002 election campaign, the Republicans were content to stay silent on the immigration issue, ceding the immigration spotlight to former House minority leader Dick Gephardt, who proposed a bill in October offering amnesty to many undocumented aliens.
Following the election, however, the Bush administration began hinting that it will revive a more limited version of its earlier amnesty plan, as well as introduce a "guest worker" program.
One little-known aspect of the large-scale 1986 amnesty, which might be relevant to the current controversy, is that it seems to have set off a significant baby boom among the Hispanic immigrants who were its prime beneficiaries.
According to data assembled by demographer Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California, in the mid-80s in California, foreign-born Hispanics women were having babies at a pace that would average out to a lifetime total of 3.25 babies per woman. As the amnesty took effect, this total fertility rate shot up to 4.44 babies per immigrant Hispanic woman by 1991. It then declined back to 3.25 babies apiece by 1998, the last year for which Johnson had data. This baby boom is now squeezing through California's intensely crowded school system.
Apparently, by allowing previously illegal
immigrants to confidently put down roots in America, it encouraged
them to have large families here.
Johnson told UPI, "The effect of a new amnesty program will depend on how many spouses join people granted amnesty in the U.S. That is an open question, and depends at least partly on the nature of the amnesty."
Abuses of migrant workers
Some Republicans who fear that an amnesty might increase the number of Democratic voters favor a guest worker program. The goal would be to let American businesses employ low-wage foreign workers without allowing them to become permanent residents or citizens (and thus voters).
This has been tried before, with some effectiveness. During World War II, the "Bracero" guest worker program permitted Mexican men to work in the United States to replace Americans in the military. Edward R. Murrow's famous "Harvest of Shame" documentary exposing abuses of migrant workers led to the 1964 abolition of the Bracero program by liberal Congressmen.
The Bracero system is harshly remembered by Hispanic activists today for trying to capture the "production but not the reproduction" of the male workers by preventing Mexican women to accompany their men north of the border.
Because any revival of the guest worker program would be unlikely to include such blatant gender discrimination, a modern guest worker program would include women. By having a baby on American soil, a guest worker could bestow upon her child -- under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment -- the gift of American citizenship. Immigration lawyers use the term "anchor baby" to indicate how much harder it then becomes to deport the infant citizen's parents. Thus, it seems unlikely that a new guest worker program could successfully emulate the old system at garnering production without reproduction.
Projecting racial categories
Under the projections' Middle Series, by 2100, non-Hispanic whites will consist of 40 percent of the population (compared to 69 percent today), blacks will remain at one-eighth, Asians will be as numerous as blacks, and Hispanics will comprise one-third of the population.
It may seem strange that the Census Bureau is still projecting racial categories a century out in time, when, ever since Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters golf tournament, it is increasingly heard that racial divisions will soon fade away as the new generations of Americans will boast beige skins
Interracial marriage is definitely increasing, but its extensiveness has often been exaggerated. In the U.S., according to the Census Bureau, about 97 percent of married non-Hispanic whites are married to other non-Hispanic whites. That percentage has been falling, but it has a very long way to go before interracial marriage becomes the norm. In the 2000 Census, 12,859,892 children under 5 years old were identified by their parents as white-only versus a mere 796,360 declared to be white and something else. That's a 16-to-1 ratio.
Further, according to an earlier UPI analysis, the highest white birth rates are in Republican-voting "Red States," where interracial marriage is uncommon. (George W. Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white birth rates.)
Black-white marriage remains rare: Less than 0.5 percent of married whites are wed to African-Americans.
Offsetting trend
Surprisingly enough, the main phenomenon slowing the growth in interracial marriages as a fraction of all marriages is mass immigration. According to "Mixed Race and Ethnicity in California" by Sonya M. Tafoya of the Public Policy Institute of California, native-born Californians are certainly doing their part to merge the races: "Multiracial births to native-born mothers rose dramatically between 1982 and 1997 -- from about 14 percent to nearly 21 percent percent, a 50 percent change."
The offsetting trend is that multiracial births to immigrant mothers, never a large proportion to begin with, declined slightly to merely 7 percent in 1997. Since 45 percent of California babies are born to foreign-born mothers, the state's overall rate of multiracial children is barely rising, up from 12 percent to 14 percent over that decade and a half.
Why are mixed-race births almost three times higher among native-born mothers than among immigrants? Tafoya reports, "Explanations include the fact that the foreign-born may be married at the time of immigration, they might be more likely to live in ethnic enclaves, they might be more closely tied to a culture that resists out-marriage, or they might encounter language barriers."
Less statistical backing
A similar claim that the major races are fading away at the global level is also becoming widespread. This has even less statistical backing. There appears to be little reason to expect significantly greater racial mixture in either Asia or Africa anytime in the 21st Century ... and those two continents are where most humans will live.
For example, the UN's best guess is that China will have 1.462 billion people in 2050. The Chinese government has shown no intention of ever admitting many immigrants, so the racial mixture level in China is unlikely to change perceptibly. The UN also projects that by 2050 India's population will grow from 1 billion to 1.572 billion. It seems improbable that many millions of immigrants from distant lands would flock to crowded and poor India, or that the Indian government would let them in if they did.
Racial mixing
Other densely populated countries that appear unlikely to attract
huge numbers of newcomers from other continents include Pakistan
(forecasted population of 344 million in 2050), Indonesia (311
million), Nigeria (279 million), Bangladesh (265 million), and
Yemen and Uganda (102 million each). In other words, the absolute
numbers of racially distinct East Asians, blacks, and non-European
Caucasians will probably be even larger in 2050 than they are
today.
Most of the growth in racial mixing will be restricted to regions where intermarriage has been a long tradition (primarily Latin America and some remote islands such as Hawaii) or are immigrant magnets (presumably North America, Australia, and Western Europe).