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More Americans than Chinese? A lot can happen in 100 years - The Globe and Mail
More Americans than Chinese? A lot can happen in 100 years
Neil Reynolds
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Sep. 13, 2010 5:00AM EDT Last updated on Monday, Sep. 13, 2010 1:21PM EDT
Canada has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world aside from a few eccentric countries such as the Cayman Islands (population: 50,000). How eccentric? The Cayman Islands serve as a depot for migrant Cubans seeking entry, one way or another, to Miami. Its apparent immigration achievement, for bragging purposes, is wholly deceptive.
By one measure, Canada accepts 5.63 immigrants a year per 1,000 population. The U.S. accepts only 4.32 immigrants 30 per cent fewer. The tiny Cayman Islands accept 16.48 immigrants, 300 per cent more. What does this astonishing number signify? It means only that, at any given moment, 824 Cubans are using the nearby islands as a stop on their way to the United States. More than 50 years after the Cuban Revolution, thousands of Cubans a year still find their way to Dade County and beyond.
Viewed from a certain perspective, Canadas immigration rate is as deceptive as the Cayman rate. It is not Canada that has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world. It is Toronto. More than 40 per cent of Canadas 250,000 immigrants choose each year to migrate to the GTA. Few of these immigrants have chosen Canada. If they had, they wouldnt all be living in the same place unless you define the GTA as Canada. (Yes, half a million Cuban Americans have crammed together in Miami but another half million chose to live in the other 49 states as well.)
Assuming that immigration trends persist, the GTA will grow by more than 9 million people in the balance of the 21st century. Add the present population (5.5 million): Toronto will easily exceed 15 million by centurys end enough people, given a fair share of seats in the Commons, to form a minority government all by itself. Yes, Vancouver will grow, too, along with Calgary-Edmonton and Montreal, but these cities will grow much more slowly. It is Toronto alone that gives Canada an extraordinary immigration rate. Without Toronto, Canada would quickly begin a persistent population decline. Canada needs this megalopolis for strategic demographic reasons for survival.
Speaking of population decline, the U.S. Census Bureau says that the United States population could reach one billion by 2100 assuming that the country keeps accepting immigrants in the same numbers it does now and that its birth rate remains high. The question arises: With most of the worlds affluent countries anticipating declines in population (or already experiencing them), why this American people boom? With its self-sustaining Total Fertility Rate, the coveted 2.1, the U.S. doesnt need immigrants to compensate for a shortage of babies.
The U.S. admits lots of immigrants anyway. For the past decade, the U.S. has taken one million legal immigrants and 500,000 illegal immigrants a year: 1.5 million people. Thus, in absolute numbers, it takes six times as many immigrants as Canada. In a population of 330 million, the U.S. now has 40 million first-generation Americans. The more people the U.S. has, the more it appears to want.
For Canada, immigrants are another government program that never quite works the way it was intended to work. We havent even been able to get much entrepreneurial advantage from our troubled investor class program; many immigrants feel kept-down; government reports lament the poor economic performance of our immigrants. For the U.S., the problems of the U.S.-Mexico border aside, immigrants are an irrepressible expression of entrepreneurial capitalism, of the dynamic energy and creative imagination that built Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, that hoisted first-generation migrants to the top of Fortune 100 companies, that enticed 400,000 European scientists from their home countries to work in the States.
In perhaps the most powerfully symbolic celebration of this American embrace of immigrants, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, a first-generation Chinese immigrant named Li Lu is expected to assume the management of billionaire Warren Buffetts financial empire when the legendary investor, now 80, retires. Amazingly, Li Lu was one of the student rebels whose democracy movement two decades ago briefly hallowed Tiananmen Square. Free man, he says, explaining his remarkable achievements. Free market. He gets it.
China is neither big enough, nor strong enough, to embrace the freedom that Li Lu represents. Chinas population is 1.3 billion; its Total Fertility Rate is 1.7 the same population-shrinking rate as Canadas. China will hit its population peak in 2030. For China, though, immigration is not much of an option. As long as it runs a command economy, the best and brightest of its inventors and innovators will make their way to the U.S. to join the best and the brightest from countries around the world.
A lot can happen in a hundred years. But when the U.S. hits one billion population on the way up in 2100, China will probably be approaching one billion on the way down.
More Americans than Chinese? A lot can happen in 100 years
Neil Reynolds
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Sep. 13, 2010 5:00AM EDT Last updated on Monday, Sep. 13, 2010 1:21PM EDT
Canada has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world aside from a few eccentric countries such as the Cayman Islands (population: 50,000). How eccentric? The Cayman Islands serve as a depot for migrant Cubans seeking entry, one way or another, to Miami. Its apparent immigration achievement, for bragging purposes, is wholly deceptive.
By one measure, Canada accepts 5.63 immigrants a year per 1,000 population. The U.S. accepts only 4.32 immigrants 30 per cent fewer. The tiny Cayman Islands accept 16.48 immigrants, 300 per cent more. What does this astonishing number signify? It means only that, at any given moment, 824 Cubans are using the nearby islands as a stop on their way to the United States. More than 50 years after the Cuban Revolution, thousands of Cubans a year still find their way to Dade County and beyond.
Viewed from a certain perspective, Canadas immigration rate is as deceptive as the Cayman rate. It is not Canada that has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world. It is Toronto. More than 40 per cent of Canadas 250,000 immigrants choose each year to migrate to the GTA. Few of these immigrants have chosen Canada. If they had, they wouldnt all be living in the same place unless you define the GTA as Canada. (Yes, half a million Cuban Americans have crammed together in Miami but another half million chose to live in the other 49 states as well.)
Assuming that immigration trends persist, the GTA will grow by more than 9 million people in the balance of the 21st century. Add the present population (5.5 million): Toronto will easily exceed 15 million by centurys end enough people, given a fair share of seats in the Commons, to form a minority government all by itself. Yes, Vancouver will grow, too, along with Calgary-Edmonton and Montreal, but these cities will grow much more slowly. It is Toronto alone that gives Canada an extraordinary immigration rate. Without Toronto, Canada would quickly begin a persistent population decline. Canada needs this megalopolis for strategic demographic reasons for survival.
Speaking of population decline, the U.S. Census Bureau says that the United States population could reach one billion by 2100 assuming that the country keeps accepting immigrants in the same numbers it does now and that its birth rate remains high. The question arises: With most of the worlds affluent countries anticipating declines in population (or already experiencing them), why this American people boom? With its self-sustaining Total Fertility Rate, the coveted 2.1, the U.S. doesnt need immigrants to compensate for a shortage of babies.
The U.S. admits lots of immigrants anyway. For the past decade, the U.S. has taken one million legal immigrants and 500,000 illegal immigrants a year: 1.5 million people. Thus, in absolute numbers, it takes six times as many immigrants as Canada. In a population of 330 million, the U.S. now has 40 million first-generation Americans. The more people the U.S. has, the more it appears to want.
For Canada, immigrants are another government program that never quite works the way it was intended to work. We havent even been able to get much entrepreneurial advantage from our troubled investor class program; many immigrants feel kept-down; government reports lament the poor economic performance of our immigrants. For the U.S., the problems of the U.S.-Mexico border aside, immigrants are an irrepressible expression of entrepreneurial capitalism, of the dynamic energy and creative imagination that built Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, that hoisted first-generation migrants to the top of Fortune 100 companies, that enticed 400,000 European scientists from their home countries to work in the States.
In perhaps the most powerfully symbolic celebration of this American embrace of immigrants, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, a first-generation Chinese immigrant named Li Lu is expected to assume the management of billionaire Warren Buffetts financial empire when the legendary investor, now 80, retires. Amazingly, Li Lu was one of the student rebels whose democracy movement two decades ago briefly hallowed Tiananmen Square. Free man, he says, explaining his remarkable achievements. Free market. He gets it.
China is neither big enough, nor strong enough, to embrace the freedom that Li Lu represents. Chinas population is 1.3 billion; its Total Fertility Rate is 1.7 the same population-shrinking rate as Canadas. China will hit its population peak in 2030. For China, though, immigration is not much of an option. As long as it runs a command economy, the best and brightest of its inventors and innovators will make their way to the U.S. to join the best and the brightest from countries around the world.
A lot can happen in a hundred years. But when the U.S. hits one billion population on the way up in 2100, China will probably be approaching one billion on the way down.
