FAQs about Immigration and US Population GrowthGrowth advocates say that people are needed to keep the economy moving, but what is the main cause of...
... the main cause is RAPID POPULATION GROWTH! • What are the components of U.S. population growth? Natural increases (birth minus deaths) and immigration are the two contributing factors to U.S. population growth. • Why should we reduce immigration? According to the Census Bureau figures, more than two-thirds of current and future population growth is the result of immigration. Dr. Steven Camarota, Director of Reseach for the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in a January 2001 paper: “Immigration has become the determinate factor in population growth. The 11.2 million immigrants who indicated they arrived between 1990 and 2000 plus the 6.4 million children born to immigrants in the United States during the 1990s are equal to almost 70 percent of U.S. population growth over the last 10 years.” Reducing immigration therefore is necessary to curb population growth. • How fast has the immigrant population grown? The immigrant population in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970, due to legislation passed since 1965 to increase immigration. • What is the impact of population growth on our environment? The California Department of Water Resources has forecast serious water shortages 10 years from now, due to population growth, most of which comes from immigration. Continued population growth directly threatens biodiversity and causes species extinction, loss of farmland and open space, and general degradation of environmental quality. • Will building more roads or schools, or improved mass transportation solve many of our problems? No. There are no long-term growth management plans that can cope with unlimited population growth. • What is the impact of rapid population growth on our public schools? In 1996, the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 2.6 million new students will be added to America's public schools (K-12) for this coming decade. A study by the California Department of Education of the state's public schools revealed that one student in four could not speak English well enough to understand what was going on in the classroom. The school districts of Minneapolis/ St. Paul, Nashville and North Carolina have student bodies in which respectively 80, 85 and 150 languages are spoken. • Does immigration only affect the border states? Large numbers of immigrants from many countries have settled in many Midwestern states. The Detroit Metropolitan area has one of the largest concentrations of Arabs outside the Middle East. • Why is it necessary to reduce immigration in order to achieve welfare and health care reform? Based on the March 1998 Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate for immigrants is 50 percent higher than that for the native-born. In 1996, welfare and Medicaid provided to elderly non-citizen legal immigrants alone cost American taxpayers more than $10 billion dollars. The high poverty rate of immigrants will increase the number of residents without health care and needing welfare, making health care and welfare reform much more difficult and expensive to address. • How does high immigration contribute to our Social Security problems? Because of the poverty rate and the large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled immigrants entering the U.S. every year, a tremendous burden is placed on government budgets, greatly depleting the Social Security Trust Fund in the long run. • What is immigration's impact on American workers? The National Academy of Science reported in 1997 that from 1980 to 1995, 44 percent of the decline in the real wages of high school dropouts resulted from immigration. The study conducted by UC Davis Professor Norman Matloff also concludes that large numbers of older immigrant and U.S-born computer scientists are displaced by newly arrived foreign-born computer programmers. • What groups are most hurt economically by high levels of immigration? Pro-immigrant Professor Paul Ong of UCLA has said, “In terms of the adverse impact on wage and employment, the adverse impact will be most pronounced on minorities and established immigrants...” |
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