Pondering the next hundred million

NATION ON THE MOVE: The flag-draped Grand Central Station in New York serves as a symbol of the shifting and growing population of the United States, which has just hit one major milestone and is anticipating the next. FILE PHOTO: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The U.S. population hit 300 million this morning, but it's the 400 million milestone, which the United States will reach in about 35 years, that has demographers and economists really talking.

Those additional 100 million people, many of them immigrants, will replace aging baby boomers in the work force, fill the Social Security coffers and, in all likelihood, keep the economy vital and American culture diverse.

But they also will further crowd cities and highways, put new strains on natural resources, end the majority status of whites, and probably widen the gulf between society's haves and have-nots.

"It's not that we're going to be running out of this and that," says Princeton University professor Charles Westoff, who headed a 1972 presidential commission that called for stabilizing the population. "But how many more people do we want?"

With about 86 people per square mile nationwide now, the U.S. would seem to have plenty of room for more. Even after the next 100 million people are added, the nation still will have one-sixth the density of Germany, whose population is expected to stop growing within a few years.

But those averages hide disparities.

Even as it grows, the population is increasingly concentrating in a dozen or so states. North Dakota is losing people, Ohio is adding a mere 20,000 people a year, and heartland states like Kansas and Nebraska average fewer than 14 households per square mile.

The Center for Environment and Population, a nonpartisan research group, calculates that more than half the population lives within 50 miles of the coasts. In the next decade, an additional 25 million people - half the total population increase - will join them there.

That concentration of population is likely to result in megacities of 25 million or more as people head to them for jobs, demographers predict, raising new worries about the spread of infectious diseases and of terrorism in such dense areas.

At the same time, population growth is accelerating sprawl and consumption, the byproducts of an increasingly affluent and older middle class.

Most demographers and economists agree that the economy probably can handle the growth - and might even need it. The U.S. population has grown 50 percent since 1967, when it hit 200 million. But the size of the economy, as measured by the production of goods and services, is up 217 percent.

Some of the fastest-growing areas of the U.S. also are the most vulnerable to natural disasters, like Florida, or are the most stretched for water, like bone-dry Nevada and Arizona. Most water consumption in the U.S. now goes to produce energy and irrigate crops, and those demands will grow with the population.

"At a certain point, you can't depend on the Colorado River and snowmelt," says Columbia professor Kenneth Prewitt, who headed the Census Bureau during the 2000 count.

As the population bounds toward 400 million, the U.S. faces yawning income and education gaps. About 40 percent of current growth is coming from immigration and an additional 12 percent from the children of immigrants. A majority of those immigrant families are Hispanic - and many are poor, uneducated and with limited access to health care.

The birth rate is currently falling: U.S.-born women are averaging about two babies each, well below replacement levels. Because of the bigger population base, the U.S. is expected to grow from 300 million to 400 million a few years faster than it took to grow from 200 million to 300 million.

Illegal immigration is accounting for some of that growth. After historically favoring Europeans, immigration laws in the '70s became more welcoming to people from developing countries.

There's little appetite in Congress for shutting down those legal avenues. An immigration bill, passed by the Senate this spring but effectively killed by the House, would have increased immigration by more than 1 million a year on top of the million immigrants already arriving legally.

Economists predict that market forces eventually will shift some of the U.S. population back to interior states where housing is cheaper, land is more abundant, social services are less stressed, and labor is cheaper for businesses.

There's some sign that's already happening. The foreign-born population of Tennessee is up 140 percent in the past five years as newcomers have begun to disperse beyond the historic gateways of New York, California and Texas. Idaho and Utah grew by 10 percent in five years, twice the rate of the U.S. generally.

The Census Bureau says the U.S. population will grow by a further 34 percent by midcentury, even as Europe's population shrinks by 8 percent and Japan contracts by 9 percent.

As Columbia's Prewitt puts it: "It's deep in our culture to grow."

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