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Comment by MikeUt | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why ecological stress is so rarely traced back to population size, outside of "debunkings" of Malthusianism.

Edit due to rate limit: One of the replies claims the US has a positive natural growth rate. This is false - US fertility is currently at 1.78 births/woman. The last time it was above the replacement level of 2.1 was in 1972, 49 years ago:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

Edit 2: As dragonwriter pointed out, I was mistaken and both are true - fertility is below replacement, and natural population growth (birth - deaths) is positive. I think this is due to population aging, and due to immigrants skewing younger (i.e. childbearing age): https://cis.org/Report/Birth-Rates-Among-Immigrants-America

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American population is driven solely by immigration, given that the average fertility is far below replacement.

If you don't want one billion Americans, then you need to propose and support:

- Ending refugee programs and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees

- Sending refugees back to safe countries

- Building walls along the southern border

- Ending the H1B visa

- deporting illegal immigrants already in the country

- Disallowing citizenship by birth

- Ending chain family migration

The bigger issue here is that Americans are moving out of States with huge pension bills, into 'younger' states with lower taxes and fewer legacy costs. Its basically a death loop playing out at an inter-state migration level.

> American population is driven solely by immigration

No, the US still has a positive natural growth rate.

Source? Because I've seen ArksanExplorer's position quoted repeatedly. (Though far below replacement is almost certainly false.)

The fertility rate is significantly below replacement (currently ~1,637.5 births per 1,000 women) [0] and yet the natural population growth rate is still positive (~+3/thousand) [1].

The two are compatible, though over the long term, if lifespans don't increase over time, a sustained below-replacement fertility would eventually require natural population growth to go negative.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr012-508.pdf

[1] https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Dem...

In 2019 the American population increased from 327.2 to 328.2.

In 2019 1.03million immigrants were granted permanent resident status.

The American population increase is entirely driven by immigration. The fertility rate is 1.73.

At some point soon the American population will begin falling, without immigration, as the baby boomers die off.

I asked dragonwriter, so I'll also ask you: Source?

> In 2019 the American population increased from 327.2 to 238.2.

That's...not an increase.

> In 2019 1.03million immigrants were granted permanent resident status.

That's kind of a non-sequitur. To make your case, you’d need net migration numbers, not number of immigrants granted permanent residency.

> The fertility rate is 1.73.

It’s actually 1.6375, but fertility below replacement isn't negative natural growth, though sustained over the long term with steady-state life expectancy it eventually leads to it.

Your numbers are off, and you omitted emigration numbers.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/ says

> The United States population on January 1, 2019 was: 329,474,910

> The United States population on December 31, 2019 was: 331,163,242

Difference = 1,688,332

(Your given population numbers correspond to roughly October 4, 2017 and May 4, 2018.)

Your 1.03M appears correct - https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/tab... . It's the 3rd smallest number of the most recent 15 years. Smaller also than 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914.

However, people do move away from the US. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/12/net-internati... comments "Net international migration added 595,000 to the U.S. population between 2018 and 2019, the lowest level this decade."

Thus, it does not appear true that "The American population increase is entirely driven by immigration".

> It's the 3rd smallest number of the most recent 15 years. Smaller also than 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914.

And the 3 largest were 1.27M, 1.18M, and 1.13M. For the last 20 years legal immigration was at an average of 1.06M/year, and the year-to-year differences were negligible (except for 2003) (yes, including during the notoriously anti-immigrant Trump presidency, that averaged 1.08M legal immigrants/year). So ranking them in terms of Nth smallest/largest makes little sense - you're studying noise.

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