Immigration Recommendations of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future

Abstract

The single word that best characterizes the handling of the topic of immigration by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future is surprise. The commission and its staff were left floundering when they realized the possible impact of current levels of immigration on population growth. The Interim Report of the Commission issued in March 1971 stated: Right now about 80 percent of our annual population growth results from natural increase--the amount by which births exceed deaths. About 20 percent of our current growth is due to net immigration; the number has been averaging about 400000 annually. Historically speaking that is not many. In the years just before World War I the figures ran to twice that at a time when the United States had less than half the number of people it has now. Even so the long-term effects of immigration are large. This is partly because most immigrants enter the country in young adulthood at an age when their childbearing is at its peak. If the average family (including immigrants) had two children and immigration continued at 400000 per year the survivors and descendants of immigrants in the next 30 years would number 16 million in the 2000 and would have accounted for one-fourth of the total population increase during that period. Over the next 100 years immigrants and their descendants would account for nearly half of the increase in population from 204 to 340 million. (Commission on Population Growth and the American Future Interim Report 1971 8-9.) At the annual meeting of the Population Association of America held in Washington D.C. in April of 1971 Charles F. Westoff the Executive Director of the Commission’s staff frankly admitted that the reported finding came as a surprise and the staff and Commission were somewhat unprepared to deal with such an unexpected state of affairs. (excerpt)