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  *** IMMIGRATION CONTRIBUTES OVER HALF TO U.S. POPULATION GROWTH ***

[ Thanks go to The Center for Immigration Studies for providing KZPG
  subscribers with this report from their fall _Immigration Review_.  
  (NOTE: The full table of contents of the fall _Immigration Review_ 
  and complete subscription details are at the very end.) -- KZPG ed. ]

By John Martin, Center for Immigration Studies

It is well understood that immigration fuels population growth, but most
people are unaware of how great a share it constitutes.  The Census Bureau
projects that "...almost one-third of the population growth would be
caused by net immigration."(1) A significantly different estimate outlined
below, which draws on official data, indicates that immigration, both
legal and illegal, accounts for over half of overall annual U.S.
population increase. 

Both of these estimates contrast with the public perception of immigrants
as only a small share of the U.S. population.  A recent Census Bureau
report found that the foreign born represented just under nine percent of
the entire population in 1994.(2) But if the foreign-born population is so
small, how can it have so great an impact on population growth?  Is the
current rate of newly arriving immigrants so high?  Is the fertility rate
of immigrants that much higher?  The answers to these questions become
clearer when it is remembered that the U.S.-born children of immigrants
are not counted as part of the foreign-born population, because they are
U.S.  citizens at birth.  If they were included with their foreign-born
parents in a calculation of the "foreign stock," as was last done with the
1970 census, the role of immigration in population growth would be easier
to understand. 

Immigrants add directly to the U.S. foreign-born population when they
become residents and indirectly when they subsequently have children here. 
Both are causes of growth in the U.S. population.  Although the children
of immigrants born in the United States are omitted from the Census Bureau
calculation since the 1970 census, including them makes sense, because if
the mother had not immigrated to the United States, the child, in most
cases, would not have been born here and, therefore, would not have added
to our population. 

The Indirect Contribution

The data on the indirect population growth effect of immigrants, i.e.,
their children born in this country, is not directly available since the
Census Bureau stopped asking about country of birth of parents in the 1980
census.  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this
information is not available in any other officially collected data at the
national level.  However, California collects information on the mother's
country of birth, and from those data an estimate for the national level
may be extrapolated. 

The California data indicate whether the mother was U.S. born, Mexican
born or other foreign born.  In 1993, foreign-born mothers gave birth to
261,670 of California's 584,480 babies.  These data ignore nationality of
the father, so they include a child whose mother is an immigrant and whose
father is native born, but omit children whose father is an immigrant and
whose mother is native born. 

This years' Census Bureau report on the foreign born put California's
immigrant population at 34.2 percent of the national total in 1994 (see
Table 1).  If immigrants in the rest of the country had children at the
same rate as California's foreign born (i.e, extrapolating by dividing the
262,000 1993 California births by 34.2%) the number of babies born
nationwide to immigrants would be about 766,000.  This estimate may be
high for various reasons, such as differences in national origin or age
composition between the California foreign-born population and that of the
nation as a whole and the possibility that California has more
non-resident foreigners giving birth than elsewhere in the country.  But
because California accounts for such a large share of the foreign-born
population, it should not be too far off target.  However, for this
analysis, we will decrease the estimate to a conservative 725,000 births
nationwide to immigrant women. 


___________________________
Table 1

       U.S. and California Population and Births (Thousands)

  Population                 U.S.          Calif.       Calif. Share
  ---------------        -------------    -------      ------------
  Overall ('94)            260,711         32,231          12.4%
  Foreign Born ('94)        22,568          7,718          34.2% 

  Births     
  --------------
  Overall ('93)              3,988            584          14.6%
  Foreign Born ('93)*          766            262          34.2%

    * U.S. foreign-born births extrapolated from california data 

   Sources: Census Bureau, U.S. and California population data
____________________________



The Direct Contribution

The flow of new legal immigrants has averaged about 770,000 each year over
the past five years.  This level of immigration does not take into
consideration the flow of earlier illegal immigrants who were allowed to
become legal residents through the amnesty provision adopted in 1986, nor
additional thousands who became residents outside of the formal
immigration system, such as by requesting asylum, so we will increase the
number to 800,000 for this estimate.  To compare these new residents from
abroad with net population growth, the new arrivals must be offset by
immigrants who leave the United States (emigrate) and who die. 

Offsetting these new legal immigrants are emigration and deaths among the
foreign born, which, for purposes of this calculation, we estimate at
160,000 and 250,000 respectively -- slightly less than for the general
population.  Finally, we add the Center's conservative estimate of 300,000
net illegal mmigrants. This results in an estimate of immigration's direct
contribution to population increase of about 690,000 per annum. 


Overall Immigrant Share of Population Growth

Adding the direct flow of 690,000 new immigrants per year to the estimated
725,000 births to foreign-born mothers, we arrive at a total of 1,415,000
new immigrant-related residents annually (see Table 2).  The Census Bureau
estimates that the U.S. population grew by 2,784,000 in 1993.  When the
annual change in population related to immigration is compared with
estimated total annual change, the overall share of annual population
increase attributable to immigration is 51 percent -- over half of all
population growth. 


____________________________________
Table 2

  Immigration's Direct and Indirect Effects on Net Population Growth 
  (Thousands)

  Indirect Impact
  ---------------------
  Immigrants Births               725,000

  Direct Impacts
  ---------------------
  Legal Immigration               800.000
  Deaths                         -250,000
  Emigration                     -160,000
  Net Illegal Immigration         300,000
  ---------------------------------------
           Total Direct           690,000
  ---------------------------------------
  Total Direct and Indirect     1,415,000
  _______________________________________


Thus, this majority share of population growth is due to both the current
high level immigration and births to immigrant women.  The data from
California also show that the fertility rate of immigrants is higher than
for the native born.  Births to the foreign-born women in California,
compared with the overall foreign-born population in the state, provides a
ratio of 3.4:100. For the entire California population, the ration is
1.8:100.  And for the nation, the ratio is 1.5:100.  Another comparison
that demonstrates this point may be made by factoring out the foreign-born
population size and birth data for both California and the nation; then
California's rate becomes 1.31:100, and the national rate is a much closer
1.35:100. 


Implications

The fact that so much of population growth results from the indirect
effect of immigration helps to explain why major immigrant-receiving
countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia have much higher
rates of annual natural population growth (i.e., without including the
direct flows of immigration and emigration) than other industrialized
countries.  According to the Population Reference Bureau, the rates of
natural population growth in the United States, Canada and Australia are
0.7 percent, 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent respectively, while that of
Western Europe is 0.1 percent and of Japan, 0.3 percent. 

Whether rapid population growth, driven by mass immigration, is harmful or
beneficial depends on a separate series of considerations, such as the
economic and fiscal costs and issues related to impact on quality-of-life. 
These latter issues include hard-to-quantify effects, such as the
consumption of non-renewable resources, pollution and crowding.  The above
calculation of the immigrant-related share of population growth does not
attempt to answer these questions.  It does, however, make it obvious that
efforts to stabilize our population size because of resource and
environmental concerns will miss the target if they do not focus on the
need to reduce both illegal and legal immigration. 

-- John Martin


NOTES

1  Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P25-1104, October 1993, 
p.vii.

2  The Census Bureau report, "The Foreign-Born Population: 1994," shows a 14 
percent jump in the foreign-born population over the past four years, taking 
it to 8.7 percent of the total U.S. population.


                 ===================================

Immigration Review, No. 23, Fall 1995

                            *Table of Contents*

  * Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 65 Immigration Act
  * The Politics and Demographics of Immigration Reform
  * Immigration Contributes Over Half of U.S. Population Growth
  * New Center Publications
  * FYI
  * Capital Currents
  * Book Reviews/Letters: _Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's 
    Immigration Disaster_,  by Peter Brimelow, reviewed by Otis Graham, 
  * Immigration Reading.
     [~17 pages total ? - kzpg]

                 ===================================

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION:
  Here are the table of contents and one of the articles from the new 
  issue of _Immigration Review_, the quarterly publication of the Center 
  for Immigration Studies.  An annual subscription is $16.  Contact me
  *directly* (NOT by using the _reply_ command in your mail reader) at
  msk@cis.org if you want more information. -- Mark Krikorian

  Mark Krikorian, executive director
  Center for Immigration Studies
  1815 H St. N.W., Suite 1010, Washington, DC  20006
  (202) 466-8185 (phone); (202) 466-8076 (fax); msk@cis.org

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