The title on the email I received from Pew Hispanic Center made me say, “D’uh”
Immigration to Play Lead Role in U.S Population Growth from 2005 to 2050, Pew Research Study Finds.
If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants, according to new projections developed by the Pew Research Center.
Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their U.S.-born children or grandchildren.
Now if they told us how many would be illegal immigrants that might really help, but, alas they don’t. Although they do say,
Births in the United States will play a growing role in Hispanic and Asian population growth; as a result, a smaller proportion of both groups will be foreign-born in 2050 than is the case now.
Doesn’t help much, does it? With my interest in finding out how much of this projection will be illegal immigration. So I tried here, specifically this article. It was still hard to find (Try pressing Ctrl-F and Typing “Legal vs. Illegal Immigration”).
[A]ssuming net illegal immigration continues at 450,000 a year, Table 1 [Scroll up the page for this] indicates that it would add 13.4 million to the population by 2030 and 37.9 million by 2060. For legal immigration, one can use the net figure of 800,000 found in the table. Legal immigration of 800,000 a year will add 23.9 and 67.4 million to the population by 2030 and 2060, respectively. Of course, the racial composition of legal and illegal immigration differs somewhat and this matters because birth and death rates vary by race. Thus, dividing up legal and illegal immigration in this way can provide only a rough indication of the impact of the two types of immigration.
Table 4 in the report (Scroll down a bit) gives details for all illegal immigrants remaining, half departing and not returning and all departing and not returning.
One thing you rarely, if ever, see discussed on blogs like The Political Environment and Sprawled Out is the discussion of how immigration enters into urban sprawl. Does it have any effect? Who knows, but these people are going to have to live somewhere.
The other interesting factoid, which doesn’t have any bearing on this post,
The Center’s report includes an analysis of the nation’s future “dependency ratio”–the number of children and elderly compared with the number of working age Americans. There were 59 children and elderly people per 100 adults of working age in 2005. That will rise to 72 dependents per 100 adults of working age in 2050.
So 28% of the population will be working for the other 72% by 2050.