Population

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

I wonder if it's time for the US to severely limit immigration from all nations, and not just the terrorist-producing kind, to just people with valuable skills (doctors/engineers/etc). I have seen where people have argued for immigration saying it's what built this country and made it great, and that is fairly true. Times also change. I saw something today that kind of amazed me.

US Population in 1900: 76.2m
US Population in 2000: 281.4m
US Population in 2010: 308.7m

Here's a couple other countries for comparison sake...

France Population in 1900: 38m
France Population in 2000: 59.4m
France Population in 2010: 62.9m

UK (+Ireland) Population in 1900: 38m
UK (+Ireland) Population in 2000: 62.7m
UK (+Ireland) Population in 2010: 67.3m

Japan Population in 1900: 42m
Japan Population in 2000: 125.7m
Japan Population in 2010: 127.3m

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Only Japan had a somewhat comparable % (but still much less) jump between 1900 and 2000 and that was mostly them becoming a developed nation. They've barely grown between 2000 and 2010, though.

France 1900 to 2010 Population % Growth: 165.5%
UK (+Ireland) 1900 to 2010 Population % Growth: 177.1%
Japan 1900 to 2010 Population % Growth: 303.1%
US 1900 to 2010 Population % Growth: 405.1%

Even a nation that got developed and industrialized during that time period had 102% less growth over their original population than the US did. This population growth rate probably isn't sustainable for the US to keep up with. If the US has another jump of equal % from 2010 to 2120, the US population would be 1.25 BILLION.

Slowing immigration down to a drip will give the US time to figure out how to convince current US citizens they don't need to pump out a dozen children each and fix that angle too. Immigration was great in the past when we needed the population for our huge country, but now we're pretty set population-wise. If anything we need to figure out how to slow down it's growth.