Sometime last week – or so they guess – the U.S. population reached 300 million.
There’s no way to know precisely when it happened, so, based on estimates that every 11 seconds the population increases by one, the U.S. Census Bureau picked a time: last Tuesday at 5:46 a.m.
It’s a milestone that has rekindled the emotional debate about population growth. Sixty percent of our growth is attributable to births. The rest comes from immigration.
Because of that, the most dramatic change is that for the first time in a century people across the nation are living alongside foreigners.
It’s something I take for granted, having grown up in New York City, where in a subway car you might hear six different languages and see huge ads for English language schools. There, no one blinks at the sight of newspapers in Spanish or Chinese. They’re ubiquitous.
But this is new to most of America.
“Immigrants used to be clustered in gateway cites: San Francisco, L.A., Boston, New York City,” said William Frey, a demographer with the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “This dispersion of immigrants to Middle America, spreading to states like North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia, is something most Americans have not experienced.”
This is the story behind the story of No. 300 million.
It’s created confusion and has stirred suspicion among people not used to being around immigrants.
Because a majority of Americans have been in this country for several generations, many do not understand how long the assimilation process takes. They expect newcomers to learn English quickly, even though it takes years.
States in the Northeast that are accustomed to immigration influxes, and rely on new arrivals to keep their populations from declining, view this issue differently. They wouldn’t think about calling on Congress to erect a wall on the southern border.
But Colorado is in a different situation. Although we’ve had growth in recent decades from people moving here from California, Texas and the Northeast, we haven’t had a foreign population influx in decades.
It explains why some Coloradans have reacted to immigrants the way many Americans did more than 150 years ago, when waves of Irish fleeing the potato famine arrived in the U.S.
Most settled in close-knit neighborhoods in northeastern cities, where many long-standing residents feared their Catholicism, job competition and potential political clout. The culture clash led to bigotry; shop owners posted signs such as “Irish need not apply.”
Later waves of newcomers – including Russians, Greeks, Italians, Turks and Romanians – also endured prejudice.
Following the Great Depression, immigration levels declined and remained low until this new wave began coming from across the southern border.
Many people who aren’t used to living alongside immigrants – documented or undocumented – have become alarmed.
In some ways, we are repeating history.
But unlike 50 years ago, when an immigrant who didn’t have a formal education could rise into the middle class through a good-paying manufacturing job, that option doesn’t exist today.
When we think about the growth of this country, we need to keep in mind policy issues that will help the children of immigrants out of poverty. Educating them is key.
The federal government needs to work out a better plan to reimburse school districts for the added burden of teaching these children English. Just as it reimburses hospitals for the emergency treatment of critically ill undocumented immigrants, the federal government needs to give more aid to schools.
Frey says it’s imperative that the federal government come up with comprehensive policies to deal with this new population, otherwise we’ll be stuck with a patchwork of laws that differ from state to state.
And that’s not good for any of us 300 million.
