Immigration "recency" of US population over time

Factual Questions
1

I heard on the radio yesterday something along the lines of in a decade or 2 immigration is going to be responsible for the greatest portion of growth in the US population. So often these days folk talk of immigration as tho it is inherently a bad thing, seemingly ignoring that - with the exception of native Americans - we are all descendants of immigrants.

Is there a meaningful way to discuss/portray the recency of immigration for what portion of the American public at various points in time. I have no idea how one would approach this statistically or graphically. For example, my most recent immigrant ancestors came over during one of the potato famines in the late 1800s - something like a great-great grandparent. But the rest of my ancestors had been here before that. Seems to me it would be easier to simply identify someone’s most recent direct immigrant ancestor, than to average across all of each person’s ancestors.

Perhaps the easiest way to approach this would be to simply count immigrants compared to the existing population. But I’m not sure that really addresses what I’m thinking about - the amnesia of current citizens regarding their personal immigrant heritage.

2

This diagram is interesting. Immigration rises & then falls for a while. It’s risen, again, lately.

Of course, the “sort of people” constituting the latest wave is upsetting some descendants of immigrants. But that’s an old theme, even for immigrants with the same color of skin…

3

We are not presently in the period of highest immigration to the U.S. In terms of raw numbers, legal immigration peaked in 1991, dropped off for a few years, peaked again (but at a smaller number) in 2006, and has dropped since then. (I’m slightly smoothing out the curve of peaks in saying this.) See this Wikipedia entry. Click on the URL in footnote 50:

The illegal immigrant population in the U.S. also peaked around 2007:

A lot of immigration trends are due just to the economic condition of the U.S. A great deal of Mexican immigrants went back to Mexico after the economic peak of 2007. This claim that you’ve heard seems to be based on the fact that the growth of the American population is slowing down because people are having fewer babies. Yes, that’s true, and it’s true everywhere in the world. The growth of the world population has been slowing down for quite a while, so the population of the world will peak around 2070:

There will continue to be growth of less developed countries for some time and there will be immigration to more developed countries to even things out, but eventually every country will reach the point where they are no longer growing in population at all.

4

Thanks. Lots of interesting information to process.

5

The main issue about that statistic is the population non-boom. Since fairly well-off Americans (i.e. non-minorities) have stopped having very many kids, well below replacement levels, of course any population growth will come eventually from immigrants. If that first generation also does not buy into the American dream - toys are more important and less of a money pit than kids - then the complexion of the USA will change faster than expected.

Not that it’s bad, just … different.

6

The same thing has happened in the UK and in most of the (more prosperous) Northern countries in the EU. As MD2000 said, the better off part of the population tend to have fewer children and frequently none at all, while the poorer people have more.

Over here this is exacerbated by the fact that someone living on benefits gets extra money to support each child. So a worker will have fewer children because they can’t support more, while someone on benefits has no such consideration. This is simplistic but does form a major part of the reason for population growth among low and no income families. I say families, but there are not too many fathers in evidence.

7

I’m American and about a quarter of my ancestry arrived at Ellis Island in the 1920’s but I’m also a descendant of a Mayflower passenger. The rest of my ancestry seems to be a healthy mix of miscellaneous white people - Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and others.

8

Part of the problem is the cost of toys. Modern technology makes a lot of toys and opportunities available that were not an option 50 or 100 years ago. It used to be a radio, a record player, or a colour TV were the height of technological options. Families if they had money, had one car. Today, we have cellphones, computers, iPads, internet, DVD-BluRay players, multiple flat screen TVs, Netflix, two-car families (or more), microwave and food processor in the kitchen; where places like the Poconos, Atlantic City or Cedar Point became big as the destination of choice for average vacationers decades ago, by now we fly half-way around the world, or to another continent, for vacations.

To pay for this level of tech, we have seen a major demographic shift - very few women are stay-at-home any more, most couples both work.

I even attribute the recent mortgage meltdown to this “problem”. (Note I’m not complaining that women working is bad… au contraire). The cost of basic housing has slowly risen as the typical couple can pay more and more. This contributed to the continual rise in house prices that culminated in the bubble and meltdown in 2008.

When the couple both work, there is a massive amount of extra disposable income. With that disposable income, come the toys, the expensive house, the luxury model cars, the expensive vacations.

Add to this the loss of income implicit then when a career wife needs to take time off to have a child. Then there’s the additional expenses - either one spouse takes a work hiatus or they pay (expensive and hard-to-find) daycare. Activities like vacations become that much more expensive and inconvenient… etc. (OTOH, countries like Russia are even worse off demographically - having NO money and trying to live a middle class lifestyle is an even bigger incentive not to increase your long-term costs).

In the third world, children were the way to support yourself in your old age. In most western societies, savings, pensions, and government old age security payments take care of that instead. We’ve all heard the dire warnings - when old age security was dreamed up, there were 10 workers supporting each retiree. By the time the baby boomers are well into retirement, there will be 2 to 1.

Mao had to decree 1 child per family to curb Chinese (third world at the time) population growth. Middle class westerners are pretty much taking care of that problem without government decrees.

Fortunately, unlike some european countries, North America still attracts and allows a huge amount of immigration. This to some extent compensates for the demographic bust; but to the consternation of the futzy traditionalists, the ethnic mix is not the same as “the good old days”.

So to the OP, the issue is not that we let in too many immigrants recently. The issue is that we don’t produce home-grown population at the old rate; and the immigrants take a generation or so to adopt that attitude of restraint. And, of course, unlike the very very old days where a lot of the immigration was from northern Europe, the new immigrants are more visibly “new”.

9

I disagree that the shift of women into the workforce and towards double-income households is “to pay for tech.”

It completely ignores the ongoing demographic shifts that pre-date the personal entertainment technology industry. Women moving into the workforce in World War II, being cast out as men returned to the workforce, and yet the upwards trend of women employed outside the home is visible throughout the 1950s and 1960s and well prior to the invention of the Walkman in 1978, the VCR in 1970, and the iPod in 2001.
The ongoing delay of marriage to later ages (see Fig. 2 in PDF) probably also has a greater role to play than “to pay for tech.”

And there is an entirely plausible argument to be made that the increased economic power of families with two wage earners rather than one made possible the amount of disposable income for spending for “tech” like Walkmen, iPods, VCRs, etc. rather than the other way around.