LONDON: If all goes according to plan, next Tuesday you should take a minute out of your busy morning to reflect on the state of affairs in the world’s only superpower. Set your watch to beep at 9.01am and 48 seconds.
At that precise moment a baby will be born in Los Angeles to a Mexican mother. The child will enter into relative poverty, but in a way she will be a millionaire - the 300 millionth citizen of the United States of America.
This being population statistics, all the above is largely codswallop. Nobody knows the precise second at which the US will cross the 300 million mark, though the time given next Tuesday is the literal interpretation of US census projections.
Nobody knows who the child will be, though a Latina born in LA is a fair guess. In 1967 Life magazine identified the 200 millionth American as Robert Ken Woo, a fourth-generation Chinese-American from Atlanta. That was pure invention too.
But there is a real core to this story. America is, at about this moment, crossing a population landmark. It may be just a figure, but it is generating the kind of self-reflection and introspection that major birthdays or anniversaries do.
First the facts: the US census bureau calculates that one American is born every seven seconds, one dies every 13 seconds, and an immigrant arrives (net) every 31 seconds. Add those together and you get a net population gain of one person every 11 seconds.
Over the past 100 years the US has seen the largest population growth in its history, fuelled by the baby boomers of the post-war years. And its trajectory is to continue to put on numbers steadily through this century, though the rate of growth will plateau around 2070. If it took 39 years to put on the last 100 million, it will take 37 years to put on the next, to reach 400 million.
This relatively simple picture of linear growth is misleading taken alone. Behind those figures lie complex movements and shifting demographic plates that are seeing the composition of America, its human make-up and even its culture and lifestyles, change dramatically.
The first of these tectonic shifts is where Americans live. The demographic centre of gravity is slowly veering from the birthplace of modern America in the north-east to the south and west. It is no coincidence that the top three fastest growing states are Nevada, Arizona and Texas. Nevada, California’s overshadowed neighbour, put on almost 17 per cent population in just four years to 2004.
Nor is the population evenly dispersed. More than half of all Americans live in 10 of its 50 states, most of them along the coasts. William Frey, a population expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the US was gravitating to a new Sunbelt beyond the traditional destinations of Florida, Texas and California. “As the coastal areas become crowded, people have started to move further inland to places like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Tennessee.”
The obverse of this trend is that the Great Plains, the cultural bedrock of cowboy America, of the life of cattle and baked beans in the huge open spaces, is becoming increasingly a myth. The mid-western states are emptying out as the population becomes ever more urbanised. Or more accurately, suburbanised. In the past 100 years the proportion of Americans living inside the urban and suburban sprawl doubled to 80 per cent.
The shift is changing the relationship of Americans to the land and to their idealisation of the American dream.
It is also having an impact on the environment. According to the Centre for Environment and Population, an independent research body, the effects of a growing population are disproportionately concentrated in the outskirts of urban areas, and they are amplified by Americans’ persistent belief that bigger equals better.
“When I travel abroad and come back, I’m always stunned by the consumption here. Cars are bigger, people travel further distances, they build bigger houses. This is the ultimate disposable consumer society,” the centre’s director, Victoria Markham, said.
It is commonly quoted that the US has 5 per cent of the world’s population but uses 25 per cent of its energy. Less well known is that each American now occupies about 20 per cent more land for housing, schools, shopping, roads and so on than he or she did 20 years ago. Almost 12,000 hectares (3,000 acres) of farmland are concreted over every day, and the rate is increasing, which leads to the most contentious seismic movement within America’s human make-up: its ethnic composition and the role of immigration.
In 1970 the newly-immigrant proportion of the American people stood at 5 per cent. Today it is 12.1 per cent and rising. The largest single national group of immigrants now is Mexican, and the largest ethnic group Hispanic. By 2050 it is projected by the census bureau that the proportion of non-Hispanic whites will have fallen from 69 per cent in the 2000 census to about 50 per cent, Hispanics will have doubled to 24 per cent, Asians also to 8 per cent, while the proportion of African-Americans will increase marginally to 14 per cent.
How you read these figures depends on which demographer you talk to. For Mr Frey, the rise of the Hispanic community, with their younger average ages and higher birth rates, is a saving grace set in the context of a rapidly ageing white population. It is what largely defines America as the only industrialised country in the world that is still putting on significant population.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service
