Determine how the changing demography of the U.S. population has affected American politics.
Discussion
Read the article
Demographic changes mentioned in the chapter and discuss how they are likely to impact the next presidential election. Be sure to write at least 150 words
America’s Population
Determine how the changing demography of the U.S. population has affected American politics.
Where we live, how we work, our racial and ethnic composition, and our average age and standard of living have all changed substantially over the course of our history. Each change has influenced and continues to influence our political life. In this section we highlight several of the most important of these demographic characteristics.
Growing
Unlike most other rich democracies, the United States continues to experience significant population growth. According to the Bureau of the Census, the population grew almost 10 percent between 2000 and 2010 to a total of almost 309 million people and had passed 318 million by the end of 2014. This leaves the United States as the third most populous country in the world, trailing only China at 1.36 billion and India at 1.24 billion. During the same period, other countries experienced stagnant growth or their population actually declined, as it did in Japan and Russia. Population growth has been the product of both a higher-than-replacement birth rate (more people are being born than dying2) and immigration. While the U.S. birth rate and immigration fell after the 2007 recession hit, both rebounded a bit in 2013. Both births and immigration are important for economic growth and fiscal health. When a country’s population grows, more people become part of the working, tax-paying population, helping to cushion the burden on national budgets of those who have retired, and more businesses are formed to service the needs of new and growing households. There is a growing market in countries with increasing populations for houses and apartments, furniture, appliances, electronics, cars, and all the multitude of services and products associated with them.
Some worry, however, that population growth in a rich country like the United States must at some point run up against the limits of available resources, such as oil, and that the natural environment will be hurt as more people invariably produce more pollutants. Of course, an increase in population need not lead to such outcomes if business firms and consumers use more efficient and less polluting forms of energy, let us say, and use and dispose of other resources in more environmentally friendly ways. How to do this and what the relative roles government and the private sector should play in accomplishing these outcomes is a recurring element of political debate in the United States today.
Becoming More Diverse
Based on a long history of immigration, ours is an ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse society.3 The white European Protestants, black slaves, and Native Americans who made up the bulk of the U.S. population when the first census was taken in 1790 were joined by Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s and 1850s (see Figure 4.1). In the 1870s, Chinese migrated to America, drawn by jobs in railroad construction. Around the turn of the twentieth century, most emigration was from eastern, central, and southern Europe, with its many ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Today most emigration is from Asia and Latin America, with people from Mexico representing the largest single component. Starting in the 1990s and continuing today, the number of immigrants from the Middle East and other locations with Muslim populations has been significant. More than 1 million people from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia immigrated to the United States between 2000 and 2013, bringing their total to about 3.5 million.4
Figure 4.1 Immigration to the United States, by Decade
Measuring immigration to the United States in different ways gives rise to quite different interpretations of its scale. Measured in total numbers, the largest numbers of immigrants in U.S. history came to the United States in the decade between 2000 and 2010. However, the immigration rate (total number of immigrant/U.S. population × 1000) is a much more important comparative statistic. As the figure demonstrates, the rate of U.S. immigration was highest in the middle and late nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century but fell after that as stringent immigration laws came into force. The rate of recent immigration, relative to the total U.S. population—even with the high numbers of immigrants who have come to the country over the past two decades—remains historically low, although it has been increasing steadily since its low point in the 1930s. In what ways do we still see the effects of this immigration history?
