300 million Americans

PINOY KASI
300 million Americans

By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 01:28am (Mla time) 10/13/2006

Published on Page A15 of the October 13, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

DEMOGRAPHERS estimate that some time this month, the population of the United States will reach 300 million. The demographic event is being looked at as a milestone, a time for reflection.

Among the major social developments that are being discussed, sometimes even hotly debated, are immigration, the shrinking household size, the rise of the women’s participation in the labor force and the impact of population growth on the environment.

Some of those issues concern Filipinos as well because of our close ties to the United States and the fact that we have some two million Filipinos living there, mostly as US citizens and permanent residents. I looked at some 20 feature articles and editorials from different American newspapers, large and small, conservative and liberal, to see how they are thinking about their being 300 million.

White fright

Other developed countries have seen their population growth slowing down, some even registering negative rates, leading to concerns about a “demographic winter” or a large elderly population. The United States is not likely to see this demographic winter because its population is still growing rapidly, through both natural increase and immigration.

American demographers note that the United States reached 100 million in 1915. In 1967, the US population reached 200 million. That was 52 years in between milestones. To reach the 300-million mark it took a shorter interval of 39 years.

America raced to its 200-million mark mainly through a baby boom, the increase in births after World War II. Immigration had dropped, and had consisted mainly of Europeans. In the 1960s, however, immigration picked up again, with large numbers coming in from Latin America and from Asia, including the Philippines. Immigration speeded up the rate of population growth to the present 300 million. Although migration itself is not part of natural increase, once they settle in, the new migrants do have a higher birth rate than the majority white population.

The changing color of migration has led to what some American newspapers describe as “white fright,” a perception that non-whites might soon outnumber whites. Even today, whites are already a minority in California, Texas, New Mexico and Hawaii.

Minorities

A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that more than half of the US population over the age of 50 (the baby boomers) believe that immigrants are a burden because they take away jobs, and add to the burden of housing and health care.

But perceptions do not always correspond to realities. Non-white Americans are still a minority, albeit a growing one. Many take on jobs that white Americans find too menial. And new migrants tend to be ambitious and fiercely independent, working (and spending) hard to achieve the American dream.

Minorities constitute a third of the US population, the largest groups being African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians. African-Americans are growing at a rate of only 1.3 percent each year, almost all of this due to births rather than immigrants. In contrast, Asian-Americans are growing at 3 percent each year, the increase due more to new immigrants than to births alone. Among Asian migrants, Filipinos rank second in number, after the Chinese.

The largest minority group are the Hispanics, defined as anyone with ancestral connections to Spain and which includes all Latin Americans. The Hispanics are growing at a rate of 3.3 percent per year, through both natural increase and immigration. Some of the newspaper articles I read speculated that the 300 millionth American would probably be Hispanic, and that the United States would have a Hispanic-American president in the not too distant future.

Other observers say it may take a while before we see a president from among the minority groups because even if they are growing rapidly, they still have much less access to political power than white Americans.

Ecological footprint

All too often, the American press describes overpopulation as a Third World problem. For a change, this “300 millionth American” event has been used to look into what a large American population will mean for the environment, their own as well as that of the world.

This is where some debates are going on. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore calls for a celebration: “We 300 million Americans are on balance healthier and wealthier and freer than any population ever... Every natural resource we depend on -- water, food, copper, and, yes, even oil -- is far more abundant today, measured by affordability, than when our population was 100 million or even 30 million.” Moore attributes all this to the American “free market capitalist system.”

Moore is clearly a disciple of the late economist Julian Simon, whom he cites and praises. Simon, incidentally, is also frequently cited by groups in the Philippines who oppose family planning. These groups claim that a large population is good for our economy because we then have more consumers, and more people to export. Not surprisingly, American conservatives, including Filipino-Americans, have been lobbying the US government to cut support for family planning overseas, claiming that there is no population problem in America, or in the world.

Not everyone agrees with this view. Several of the articles I reviewed refer to the Americans’ “ecological footprint,” the amount of land and water needed to support an individual, in terms of resources of survival as well as space for the waste generated. One estimate is that each American’s ecological footprint is 24 acres (9.7 hectares), given current consumption patterns. Environmentalist groups call on Americans to become more socially aware and responsible, especially since the resources being consumed often involve those of other countries.

The debates are likely to continue, shaping policies that impact on many countries, including the Philippines, from the quotas we get each year for immigrants, to the level of funding given by the US government to international family planning programs and, yes, to the political situation in the Middle East.

A small newspaper from California, the Merced Sun-Star, asks Americans to think about the demographic facts and figures and to ask the questions “about who we are; what we hope to achieve; how we can improve the lives of a large, poor minority amid so much plenty; and how to improve relations with the rest of the world and with each other.”

It’s encouraging to read articles like this, as America moves on to its “400 millionth American” milestone, estimated to come in 2043. Maybe with time, we’ll hear many more such voices, especially from minority Americans, including Filipinos, who become Americans without losing memories of their roots, and of the need for global citizenship. The US demographic milestones are, after all, global ones as well.