The great American melting pot

Americans are panicking again about immigration and the size of their population. But they shouldn’t, says Patrick Allitt. The US remains the greatest assimilator of new peoples

The American census takes place every ten years, in the zero year of each decade. I filled out my form last week and anticipate being part of a final tally that will come in at around 310 million. Pundits react to this decennial ritual with a flurry of stories. You can always find a crowd who say the country is badly overpopulated, and a forlorn little bunch who are afraid it’s underpopulated. Both groups offer persuasive reasons for their views, and both predict dire consequences.

The debate has been going on for decades. In the 1960s the great fear was explosive growth of the population in response to the baby boom, rising life expectancy and new miracle drugs. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford university biology professor, published The Population Bomb in 1968, declaring that the battle for population control was over and that we had lost.