Bacon's Rebellion

(Last in a series of articles)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The United States, including the Commonwealth of Virginia, has a demographic problem. Luke Rogers, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Estimate Branch explains,“The first Baby Boomers reached 65 years old in 2011. Since then, there’s been a rapid increase in the size of the 65-and-over population, which grew by over a third since 2010. No other age group saw such a fast increase. In fact, the under-18 population was smaller in 2019 than it was in 2010, in part due to lower fertility in the United States.”

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) uses two measures of fertility rate:

• General fertility—number of live births for 1,000 women in their child-bearing years (15-44) in a given year.
• Total fertility—estimated number of births that 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes based on the age-specific birth rate in a given year. It is used in connection with the replacement rate—the level at which a given generation can exactly replace itself (2,100 births per 1,000 women),

As the graph below shows, both the number of births and the general fertility rate in the United States has been generally decreasing since 2007. In 2023, the number of births declined 2 percent from 2022 and the general fertility rate was down by 3 percent, to a historic low. 

Furthermore, the total fertility rate decreased by 2 percent to 1,616.5, considerably below the replacement rate of 2,100. “The rate has generally been below replacement value since 1971 and consistently below replacement since 2007.”

(Second article in a series)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Immigrants are human beings.

The Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian tradition declares that God created human beings “in his own image.” One of the founding documents of the United States declares, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”

It follows that immigrants are human beings, the same as all Americans, and that they have, like us, an inherent right to “life, liberty, ad the pursuit of happiness.”

“Immigrant” is a broad term. To be clear, in this article, when I refer to immigrants, I am addressing the undocumented immigrants already living in the country as well as those who come each year seeking asylum because they do not fit into one of the narrow categories that U.S. immigration law establishes.

This article will delve into how many there are, who they are, why they come, and how they got here.

(First article in a series)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

                                    Emma Lazarus

How quaint!

Today’s sentiments toward immigrants range from Donald Trump labeling them as “animals” who have been released from prisons and insane asylums to subsequently “plunder, rape, slaughter, and [destroy] our American suburbs, cities, and towns” and “poison the blood of our country” to Joe Biden instituting restrictions on asylum when the 7-day average of crossings exceeds 2,500.

In 2022, the size of the foreign-born population in the United States was estimated to be 47.9 million people, about 14.3 percent of the total population, which was below the high of 14.8 percent in 1890. Of those 47.9 million, 23.4 million, 49 percent, were naturalized citizens. There were 11.5 million (23 percent) lawful permanent residents and two million (four percent) temporary lawful residents. The remaining 11 million (23 percent) were undocumented. The undocumented constituted about 3.3 percent of the total U.S. population in 2022.

In its American Community Survey, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were 1,163,486 foreign-born residents in Virginia in 2023. Of that group, 662,372, or 57 percent, were naturalized U.S. citizens. The data does not break down the 501,114 foreign-born who were not U.S. citizens into how many were legal residents or undocumented immigrants.