Immigration and Illegal Aliens are More a Burden than a Blessing - "the Impact Of Immigration On U.s.population Growth," Testimonyprepared For The House Judiciarycommittee Subcommittee Onimmigration And Claims, July 19, 2001,by Steven A. Camarota, Directo

While there should be no real debate about the overall impact of immigration on population growth, there is, and should be, a debate over whether this kind of increase in population is desirable for the country. Below I examine some of the consequences that would seem to be unavoidable if the population continues to grow dramatically. There are clearly benefits from population growth; many advocates of high immigration, for example, point to the increase in equity for owners of real estate and greater opportunities and choices it should create for businesses and consumers. Nonetheless, there are clearly real costs as well:

Sprawl and Congestion—If we accept the admittedly low [population] projections discussed above, which indicate immigration will add seventy-six million people to the population over the next fifty years, it means that we will have to build something like thirty million more housing units than would otherwise have been necessary, assuming average household size. This must have some implications for worsening the problems of sprawl, congestion, and loss of open spaces, even if one makes optimistic assumptions about successful urban planning and "smart growth." A nation simply cannot add nearly eighty million people to the population and not have to develop a great deal of undeveloped land.

Can we quantify the role that population growth plays in causing land to become built up, which is a basic definition of sprawl? It turns out that we can. At its simplest level, there are only three possible reasons for an increase in developed land. Either each person is taking up more land, there are more people, or some combination of the two. It's the same with any natural resource. For example, if one wants to know why the United States consumes more oil annually now than it did say twenty years ago, it is either because there are more Americans, or because each of us is using more oil, or some combination of the two. In the case of sprawl, the natural resource being consumed is land.

If one compares the increase in developed land in the nation's 100 largest urbanized areas between 1970 and 1990, it turns out that the causes of sprawl are split right down the middle between population growth and increases in per person land consumption. Of course, this is not true in every city, but overall, population growth contributed to sprawl in equal proportions. While we cannot say with absolute certainty that population growth will continue to cause more and more land to be developed, both past experience and common sense strongly suggest that population growth of this kind has important implications for the preservation of farm land, open space, and the overall quality of life in many areas of the country.

Size of the School-Age Population—In the last few years, a good deal of attention has been focused on the dramatic increases in enrollment experienced by many school districts across the country. The Department of Education recently reported that the number of children in public schools has grown by nearly eight million in the last two decades. All observers agree that this growth has strained the resources of many school districts. Increased funding for education at the state, local, and federal levels has barely been able to keep pace with new construction and prevent class size from growing. While it has been suggested that this increase is the result of the children of baby boomers reaching school age (the so called "baby boom echo"), it is clear from the Current Population Survey that immigration policy explains the growth in the number of children in public schools.

We know that immigration accounts for the dramatic increase in school enrollment because the CPS not only asks all respondents their age and if they are immigrants, it also asks when they came to live in the United States. In addition, the CPS asks all persons if their parents were immigrants. With this data, it is a very simple matter to estimate the impact of recent immigration on public schools. In 2000, there were about eight million school-age children (ages five to seventeen) of immigrants who had arrived since 1970. The children of immigrants account for such a large percentage of the school-age population because a higher proportion of immigrant women are in their childbearing years and because immigrants tend to have more children than natives. Thus immigration accounts for virtually all of the increase in the school-age population in the United States over the last few decades. More importantly, without a change in immigration policy, the number of children in our already overtaxed schools will continue to grow. The absorption capacity of American public education is clearly an important issue that needs to be taken into account when formulating a sensible immigration policy. Failure to consider this capacity may have very real consequences for public education in the United States.