The great American melting pot

Americans are panicking again about immigration and the size of their population. But they shouldn’t, says Patrick Allitt. The US remains the greatest assimilator of new peoples

The American census takes place every ten years, in the zero year of each decade. I filled out my form last week and anticipate being part of a final tally that will come in at around 310 million. Pundits react to this decennial ritual with a flurry of stories. You can always find a crowd who say the country is badly overpopulated, and a forlorn little bunch who are afraid it’s underpopulated. Both groups offer persuasive reasons for their views, and both predict dire consequences.

The debate has been going on for decades. In the 1960s the great fear was explosive growth of the population in response to the baby boom, rising life expectancy and new miracle drugs. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford university biology professor, published The Population Bomb in 1968, declaring that the battle for population control was over and that we had lost. Yet by the time the 1980s rolled around, suburbanites found they weren’t reduced to gnawing old bones and eating grass. The economist Julian Simon wrote a rebuttal to Ehrlich, The Ultimate Resource, in which he argued that the appearance of more people was something to celebrate, not something to regret. Don’t worry about ‘too many mouths to feed’, he wrote. After all, every mouth is attached to two hands and a brain. By and large, the addition of human ingenuity and labour power that each person brings in to the world more than outweighs his or her need for food. Simon added that the food-to-population ratio in the world had never been better, and that the great problem for American and European farmers was overproduction.

More recently, the commentator Ben Wattenberg’s Fewer (2004) added a new wrinkle to the argument, saying that the trends now suggest that the world’s population, after peaking later this century, will go into a long decline.