The United States with under 5% of the world's population at approximately 315 million official residents is estimated to be using 25% to 30% of the world's resources. Population projections and trends indicate that the U.S. population could go over 1 billion people by the beginning of the next century - within the lifetimes of many of today's American toddlers (See U. S. Census Population Projections[pdf] and the previous post of this blog). This especially appears to be the case when you include the many millions of unofficial permanent residents who did their best not to be included in the latest census, which means that the real population of the USA is probably well over 320 million.
Clearly the math of the situation doesn't add up to a happy conclusion if the population of the USA rises to one billion: 1. There is no way that resources per person in the USA can stay up at the current high levels with an American population of anywhere near 1 billion people. 2. It is immoral on a planetary basis for the people of the USA to let their population total increase much further as long as Americans strive to have such a high percentage of world resource usage.
Please write your senators, representative and the President now and tell them to stop supporting mass immigration levels of a million or more permanent immigrants per year (see page 10 of 2011 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics[pdf]) and instead to support an average of no more than 2 to 5 hundred thousand new permanent immigrants per year, an amount that should allow us to keep the country's population under half a billion people by the beginning of 2100. Despite recent reports on the media to the contrary, the population of the USA is continuing to increase at an alarming rate and there are powerful political interests working to increase yearly immigration levels and the population growth rate of the country.