300 Million ... and Counting

As I write, the US Census Bureau's Population Clock is ticking towards the 300 million mark.  The last time the figure hit a 100 million landmark was in 1967 when the population was 200 million. In one category the situation today is more similar to 1915  (when  the  population reached the 100 million count) than it is to 1967. In 1967 the percentage of foreign born Americans amounted to just 5% of the total. In 1915 immigrants accounted for 15% of the US population and today the figure is 12%.  In 2006, America is once again in the "melting pot" mode as was the case at the beginning of the last century.  There is one difference though. Last century's new immigrants were mostly from Europe. Today they are most likely to be from Central and South America or Asia.

"The 300 millionth American is expected to arrive this week, but unlike past population milestones, there's a good chance that landmark resident won't necessarily be a newborn.

She or he may be an adult immigrant.

All the U.S. Census Bureau knows for sure is that a baby is born in the country every 7 seconds, a new immigrant arrives every 31 seconds on average and someone dies every 13 seconds, for a net average gain of one resident every 11 seconds.

A lot has changed since 1967, the year that America hit the 200 million mark. At that point, foreign-born residents made up just 5 percent of the population. By 2004, with the advent of legal reforms in 1965 that revived immigration, that figure had jumped to 12 percent.

Put another way, immigrants and their children and grandchildren have accounted for more than half of the population increase in the United States since 1967, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"We are returning to our melting-pot roots," said William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution.

Immigrants accounted for 15 percent of Americans in 1915, when the nation's population hit 100 million. The largest group was Germans, and rising anti-immigration sentiment led Congress to adopt immigration controls in the 1920s and 1930s.

Today's fights about immigrants, especially those here illegally, don't compare with the intense fear and hatred at the dawn of the 20th century, said Mike Hout, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Look at Columbus Day in 1900, when the first really big parade was organized in New York," Hout said. "Two days prior, the state Assembly passed a bill prohibiting hiring alien Italians for state contracts. The New York Times quoted a socialite saying she was employing Italian gardeners, but she'd fire them as her patriotic duty.

"For the march, 30,000 Italians and Italian Americans congregated ... and two blocks later they were greeted with a shower of bricks from Irish workers on a local construction site protesting Italians taking their jobs. Cops broke up the march with billy clubs."

Comments

[razib]

There is one difference though. Last century's new immigrants were mostly from Europe. Today they are most likely to be from Central and South America or Asia.

more than one

here are two more

1) one large and consistent wave are united by a common language (i.e., spanish)

2) the current wave is bimodal in its skillset, e.g., the latinos tend to be far lower and the asians (and residual europeans) tend to be somewhat higher than the american median. the 19th century waves was nation of peasants (50% of americans lived on family farms in 1900) greeted by immigrants of peasants

[Ruchira Paul]

Here is the projection for Texas in anothere 40 years or so, by which time the US population is expected to hit the 400 million mark.
The Texas profile is supposed to mirror the national trend.