Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian Stevenson on Vimeo.
For some context, look abroad, where stagnant populations pose daunting problems. The economies of Western Europe, for example, face retirement crises much more severe than ours because there are fewer young workers to support retirees. What's more, part of the reason that they are not growing as fast through immigration is that they are not creating as many jobs.The USA is alone among advanced nations in its population growth. It grew by 13% during the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau. That is five times the average of other industrialized countries. This growth, however, is not evidence of overcrowding. With an average of about 80 people per square mile — one-eighth that of the United Kingdom — the USA does not have a population problem. What it has is a population distribution problem.
The 6 million who live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, for instance, are nearly double the entire population of the nearby state of Oklahoma. Large swaths of the country, meanwhile, struggle to keep their population.
The solution to such problems lies not in quashing economic growth but in stimulating it with better transportation and land-use policies, combined with technologies that allow people to telecommute from more pastoral settings.
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