Thread: U.S. approaches 300 million mark

U.S. approaches 300 million mark
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... n0530.html

Jon Kamman
The Arizona Republic
May. 30, 2006

Maybe it will be a baby born into a White, middle-class family in Gilbert, one of the fastest-growing communities in the nation.

Or it could be a youthful Hispanic laborer trudging through the desert after slipping undetected across the Mexican border.

It could even be a U.S. soldier returning from the war in Iraq.

Whoever it turns out to be, a person who is born in or moves to the United States around Oct. 24 will make this a nation of 300 million residents.

A "population clock" ticking on the Web page of the U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov, is edging toward the 298.9 million mark this week. Taking births, deaths and immigration into account, it tallies a net gain of one person every 11 seconds, or more than 7,800 people a day.

But guess what?

Because the Census Bureau has found it impossible to count Americans living abroad, the nation already may have passed the 300 million mark if all residents, plus anyone who has the right to consider the United States home, are included.

Even members of the military and their families stationed overseas aren't counted until they come home. Those, along with other federal employees, exceed 600,000. Retirees in such countries as Mexico could add 1 million or more.

Then again, it wouldn't be accurate to say the United States is a nation of 300 million "citizens," because the total includes many foreigners living here, ranging from undocumented immigrants to fully credentialed ambassadors from around the world, and foreign students to entertainers.

Variables aside, reaching the milestone "gives us time to pause and reflect about our nation, who we are, and where we're going," said Howard Hogan, director of the population division of the Census Bureau.

"From my perspective," he said, "it's just a lot like a birthday or a 50th wedding anniversary."

Reaching the number could be a springboard for serious discussion of population trends, demographers say, but it also is likely to spawn some outlandish images.

Here's one:

If all 300 million people were to climb one upon another's shoulders, the column would reach the moon, 238,712 miles away. (That's based on an average height of 4.2 feet per person, a tough stretch for babies but perhaps compensated for by such people as Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6 center for the NBA's Houston Rockets.)

The temptation will be to shower an individual with attention as the 300 millionth resident, as if the estimate were an actual nose count.

Life magazine did that when the nation hit the 200 million mark. It picked a fourth-generation Chinese-American boy born in Atlanta at 11:03 a.m. on Nov. 20, 1967.

India bestowed substantial cash and gifts on a baby girl whose arrival in 1999 put that nation's population at 1 billion. Belgium made a big deal of reaching the 10 million mark around 1997.

In a serious vein, reflections on the 300 million mark should focus more on population management than on sheer numbers, said Carl Haub, a demographer with the independent Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C.

"If you live in a place like Maricopa County, you know how overwhelming growth can be," Haub said. For many people, such major metropolitan areas as Los Angeles and Washington have reached the saturation point, stimulating a move to smaller cities for quality-of-life issues, he said.

Regardless of tighter immigration laws, an influx of foreigners will continue to play a large role in population gains, Haub said. As long as economic conditions in other countries are so far below U.S. levels, "you won't be able to stop it," he said.

Early this year, University of Michigan and Brookings Institution demographer William Frey predicted that the 300 millionth American likely would be a Latino of Mexican ancestry born in the Los Angeles area. But Haub takes issue with that.

Births to White, non-Hispanics still far outnumber those to Hispanics, and Hispanics make up just half of immigrants, he said.

The census projects that the nation's population will hit the 400 million milestone by 2050, and at that point, White, non-Hispanics will make up about half of the total population.

Do you remember when the government and all the intellectuals were telling us all that we had to limit our families because this country couldn't hold them?

Isn't is strange now that the 'smart ones' are telling us we can contain millions and millions more. Millions more poor, uneducated and in some cases diseased people??

Do you remember when the government and all the intellectuals were telling us all that we had to limit our families because this country couldn't hold them?

We were told to only have 2 children in the public schools that I attended in the 60s and 70s. I found out later that other people with more than 2 children were being supplied with fertility drugs at the same time we were told to have only 2 children.