Babies can seem a lot less cute when you dont have the wherewithal to support them.
Fewer jobs and lower income mean more concern about how to pay for growing families and the homes they live in, the clothes they wear, the food they eat...ad infinitum. And if you are contemplating spending thousands of dollars - while risking your life - to try to enter the US as an immigrant, particularly an undocumented one, you would probably be less inclined to do so if you were hearing that opportunities are less plentiful than they once were. Especially if you are also hearing that the natives have gotten very tetchy about all this and view you as competition rather than help.
The US experienced significant population growth from the Great Depression until 2009. Since then, it's been a different story. Understandable, perhaps. But what has been a point of pride - and economic stimulation - has become a reminder of how perceptions change. Young adult unemployment is up. Births are down (and those born out of wedlock are now in the majority). So are marriages, to the lowest levels in history. Prospects are not perceived to be advantageous for family formation. Nor for immigration, legal or otherwise.
If levels stay down, the longer term implication is that there will be fewer active workers to support those retiring in the future, unless, of course, immigration is encouraged. Which would require a significant change in political attitudes about that and about public spending to spur growth and encourage those families-in-waiting.
That could well happen - necessity has been known to make public policy positions much more flexible. The harsh reality is that a consumer-driven economy needs new citizen-consumers to drive demand. Ideology may turn out to be an unaffordable luxury.JL
Haya El Nasser reports in USA Today:
The U.S. population is growing at the slowest rate since the Great Depression after two decades of robust increases.
For two consecutive years since 2009, the population has grown just 0.7% a year, down from annual increases around 1% in previous years and the lowest since the late 1930s.
The U.S. gained 2.2 million people from 2010 to 2011 — fewer than the 2.8 million added a decade earlier — reaching a total of 311.6 million.
"Almost anybody who observes these things over the years can say this is almost all recession-related," says Carl Haub, demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.
The government says the recession ended in June 2009. Although the economy has improved, the downturn's effect on birth and immigration lingers. The number of babies born from July 1, 2010, to July 2011 dropped 200,000 from the same period in 2008-09. The number of additional immigrants fell 150,000.
"It's an indicator of an unhealthy economy," Haub says. "People are obviously still delaying births, and immigration has continued to drop because job opportunities are not there."
The U.S. fertility rate — which has been close to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in contrast to many developed nations that are well below that level — now is estimated to have fallen to 1.9, says demographer Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations Population Division and more recently research director at the Center for Migration Studies.
Demographers expect population growth to pick up when the economy rebounds fully, but a bounce-back in births is likely to lag.
"Many — but likely not all — of the postponed births can be expected to be made up," Chamie says. "Even with the slight current downturn in births, the U.S. population will very likely reach 400 million midcentury."
For much of the nation's history, a booming population symbolized economic vitality and growing influence in the world. But environmental groups have questioned how many more people the nation can support, fueling a push for "sustainable" communities that encourage conserving green space and relying less on autos.
"Population does not necessarily equal economic growth anymore," says Bill Fulton, vice president for policies and programs at Smart Growth America, a coalition of environmentalists, planners and others working to slow sprawl.
He points to Las Vegas' population boom, which created low-paying jobs that disappeared when the housing market collapsed. By contrast, he says, cities such as Pittsburgh lost population but household wealth went up.
"We're still talking about adding a lot of people," Fulton says. "We know we can't environmentally sustain those people living in sprawled locations. … Local governments are not going to be able to afford sprawl anymore."
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