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Name Index
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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15 - Population Policy
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- 28 December 2016, pp 386-415
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
A population policy is a deliberately constructed arrangement or program “through which governments influence, directly or indirectly, demographic change” (Demeny, 2003: 752). These arrangements, typically, are “legislative measures, administrative programs, and other governmental actions intended to alter or modify existing population trends in the interest of national survival and welfare” (Eldridge, 1968: 381). The demographer John May has written that “population policies are designed to regulate and, if possible, mitigate the problems [of too rapid growth or decline] by adjusting population size and structure to the needs and aspirations of the people” (2005: 828; 2012).
Population policies usually represent strategies for governments or sometimes, albeit less frequently, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to attain specific goals. The procedures or programs are put into place to ensure that the policy goals are attained. A policy is generally intended to either reduce or increase population levels. Policies are developed “in the interest of the greater good…in order to address imbalances between demographic changes and other social, economic and political goals” (May, 2005: 828).
I have mentioned in earlier chapters of this book that many countries in the world today have high rates of population growth, that many have negative or near-negative rates of growth, and that many have fertility rates below replacement levels. In 2013, for instance, seventy-nine countries had TFRs below 2.1; in 1970, there were only ten such countries (PRB, 2014). Countries exhibiting demographic conditions of too-high growth or too-low growth sometimes develop policies whose goals are aimed at trying to restore the demographic balance.
Whether the issue is severe or minor, demographic behavior is of interest to all governments. In the United States, the onset of the baby boom in the mid-1940s resulted in major changes in governmental action in many areas. And, of course, some governments actually installed stated government policies, several of which I will review in this chapter.
Population and Society
- 2nd edition
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Leon F. Bouvier
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This comprehensive yet accessible textbook is an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students taking their first course in demography. Clearly explaining technical demographic issues without using extensive mathematics, Population and Society is sociologically oriented, but incorporates a variety of social sciences in its approach, including economics, political science, geography, and history. It highlights the significant impact of decision-making at the individual level - especially regarding fertility, but also mortality and migration - on population change. The text engages students by providing numerous examples of demography's practical applications in their lives, and demonstrates the extent of its relevance by examining a wide selection of data from the United States, Africa, Asia, and Europe. This thoroughly revised edition includes four new chapters, covering topics such as race and sexuality, and encourages students to consider the broad implications of population growth and change for global challenges such as environmental degradation.
4 - Fertility
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
Fertility refers to the actual production of children, which in the strictest sense is a biological process. A zygote is produced when the sperm of a male and the egg of a female are united, and around nine months later a baby is born. Most often in this process, although not always, a man and a woman have sexual intercourse, the woman conceives, and the conception results in a live birth. Even though the production of a child is a biological process, the various activities and events that lead to the act of sexual intercourse and, later, to giving birth, are affected by the social, economic, cultural, and psychological characteristics of the woman and the man, as well as by the environment in which they live. The key to this paradox is that engaging in intercourse, conceiving, and giving birth are themselves behaviors that are influenced by other factors, most of them social and cultural. So while we have no influence at all with regard to the family and parents we receive when we are born, we do have a significant influence on our own fertility. We will decide whether or not we produce children, and, if so, the number and timing of the children produced. That is, whether we decide to engage in sexual intercourse, whether this intercourse results in a conception, and whether a live birth is the outcome are all driven largely by social and cultural considerations.
Fertility may be studied in different ways, one of which is cross-sectionally, that is, at one point in time; a cross-sectional perspective is also known as a period perspective. Were we to study the fertility behavior of women and men in the year 2015, we would develop cross-sectional fertility measures (also called period measures) that would show the number of births to women and men in the calendar year 2015. Most of the fertility measures I present in this chapter are period measures; they refer to a particular time period. A period rate is a rate based on behavior occurring at a particular point or period in time.
5 - The Family and Sexuality
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I discuss two topics of special interest to demography, namely, the family and sexuality. They are important because, as Linda Waite has noted, in most times and places the family is the responsible unit for the production of the next generation, that is, fertility occurs in the family (Waite, 2005: 88). However conceptualized and whatever its structure, fertility, that is, the production of children, operates within the family. Sexuality also has demographic importance because, for one reason, that part or dimension of sexuality dealing with sexual preference often, but not always, leads to the linking or the partnering of two adults within the family setting. And under certain instances, the behavioral dimension of sexuality results in the production of children. I consider later in this chapter in greater detail the three dimensions of sexuality.
I first undertake a historical review of the family, its structure, and form. Today many consider the traditional family to consist of the “male breadwinner working outside the home and the stay-at-home mother taking care of the kids” (Iceland, 2014: 39). This is the kind of idealized family that represented much of America in the 1950s and may be revisited in the reruns of such television programs as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and “Leave it to Beaver,” shows that I watched almost every week when I was a child. But this family form was not the “traditional” family. As John Iceland reminds us, it differed tremendously from the “traditional families of the colonial era and much of the nineteenth century” (Iceland, 2014: 39). The historian Stephanie Coontz (2000) makes a similar point in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. My historical review of the structure and form of the family will show its significant heterogeneity over time.
I follow my historical review with an empirical depiction of the family today. The contemporary family has changed tremendously in the past sixty-five years. For instance, whereas sixty-five years ago 98 percent of children in the United States lived in two-parent “Ozzie and Harriet”-type families, by 2014 it had dropped to 68 percent (Cavanaugh, 2015). Today, as I will show later, people marry later, fewer people marry, premarital cohabitation is normative, and over 40 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers.
13 - Population Change in the United States
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
The United States is the third most populous country in the world after the two demographic billionaires, China and India. In 2015, the population of the United States numbered 321 million inhabitants, compared with 1.36 billion in China and 1.29 billion in India (PRB, 2015). When the first census was conducted in the United States in 1790, the population size of the country (as then defined geographically) was just under 4 million, which is about the size today of the metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona. In 220 years, the United States has increased tremendously in size, from 3.9 million inhabitants in 1790, to just under 309 million in 2010 (Figure 13.1), to more than 321 million in 2015. In this chapter, I trace the patterns of population growth of the United States from colonial times to the present and then examine some projections of the US population for the future.
HISTORY OF POPULATION CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES
The Precolonial Period
Estimates for the precolonization period of the size of the population in the land now known as the United States are not easy to obtain, and they vary considerably: “There is probably no single figure that can be accepted as the ‘best’ estimate of the late fifteenth century North American population” (Snipp, 1989: 9). According to Zinn, “The Indian population of [around] 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New England wrote in 1656 that ‘the Indians…affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died’” (2003: 16).
The number of Native Americans continued to decline over the next centuries and totaled between 125,000 and 150,000 by 1900 (Thornton, 1990: 42). This decline resulted in part from attrition during the continual warfare in which they participated in the defense of their tribal lands, as well as from unusual hardships and, as just noted, from diseases introduced by the European settlers.
10 - Age and Sex Composition
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
Of all the characteristics of human populations, age and sex are the most important and relevant for demographers. They are so important for demographic analysis that they are sometimes referred to as the demographic variables. The demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration produce the population's age and sex structure (Horiuchi and Preston, 1988), and the age and sex structure influences the demographic processes. I have already shown in Chapter 1 the very close relationship between the demographic variables and the demographic processes.
The importance of age and sex extends considerably beyond demography. The division of labor in traditional societies is based almost entirely on age and sex. In fact, age and sex differences of one form or another are found in all known human societies (Davis, 1949; Murdock, 1949).
At the individual level, age and sex are of such tremendous importance in our daily life that we usually do not realize that we are observing them. Whenever you walk across campus or on the streets where you live, what are the first two characteristics you recognize about an approaching person? The person's presentation of gender from which you infer his or her sex, and a rough notion of his or her age, that is, whether the person is a baby, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle-aged person, or a senior. We make these determinations mainly on the basis of outward appearances, and we make them so automatically that they are done subconsciously.
The determination of a person's sex is usually the first item of information we obtain, and this is based mainly on how the person presents themselves. Also, it is often the case that the person's given name tells us his or her sex. If you inform your mother that you have just met someone with the name Nancy, Jane, Bethany, or Rachel, she will certainly know that the person you met is female. If the person you have just met has the given name David, Daniel, Richard or Mark, your mother will recognize this person to be male.
6 - Contraception and Birth Control
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- 28 December 2016, pp 123-162
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INTRODUCTION
Discussions of fertility and the family and sexuality, the topics of Chapters 4 and 5, are not complete without a consideration and review of contraception and birth control. Most married and unmarried sexually active women and men in the United States and in the countries of the developed world endeavor to limit their family size and/or to control the timing and spacing of their births. In the developing countries of the world, fewer people use birth prevention methods.
There are a variety of methods available to women and men to prevent births. The most popular ones worldwide are contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Some methods are more effective than others, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. In this chapter, I first review briefly the history of fertility control. Although fertility control methods have been widely used and publicly accepted in the past five or so decades, attempts to control fertility have characterized human populations for centuries. I follow this review with a description of the general situation worldwide and in the United States regarding the use of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. The main part of the chapter is a description of the major methods of birth prevention, including a discussion of their effectiveness.
BRIEF HISTORY OF FERTILITY CONTROL
The idea or notion of preventing births appeared early in human history. Of the many excellent and comprehensive accounts of contraception available today, I call your attention specifically to several. The classic is Medical History of Contraception by Norman Himes, first published in 1936, with a paperback edition in 1970. This is an exhaustive survey of contraception covering many cultures worldwide over 3,000 years. It is a masterful collation of historical and anthropological evidence from preliterate societies to the early twentieth century.
In 1966, John T. Noonan wrote the superb Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. As stated in the subtitle, it traces the very interesting history of contraception from the pre-Christian era to the 1960s, with the heaviest concentration on the interpretation and reception of contraception in the Catholic Church.
1 - An Introduction to Demography
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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WHAT IS DEMOGRAPHY?
This book is an introduction to demography. A short definition of demography is the systematic and scientific study of human populations. The word demography comes from the Greek words δημος (demos) for “population” and γραφια (graphia) for “description” or “writing,” thus the phrase, “writings about population.” The term demography was first used in 1855 by the Belgian statistician Achille Guillard in his book Elements of Human Statistics or Comparative Demography (Borrie, 1973: 75; Rowland, 2003: 16). Most demographers (Hauser and Duncan, 1959; McFalls, 2007; Micklin and Poston, 2005) agree about the objectives and definition of demography.
Demography is the social science that studies: (1) the size, composition, and distribution of the human population of a given area at a specific point in time; (2) the changes in population size and composition; (3) the components of these changes (fertility, mortality, and migration); (4) the factors that affect these components; and (5) the consequences of changes in population size, composition, and distribution, or in the components themselves. Hence, demography may be more broadly defined as the scientific study of the size, composition, and distribution of human populations and their changes resulting from fertility, mortality, and migration. Demography is concerned with how large (or how small) are the populations; how the populations are composed according to age, sex, race, marital status, and other characteristics; and how the populations are distributed in physical space (e.g., how urban and rural they are) (Bogue, 1969). Demography is also interested in the changes over time in the size, composition, and distribution of human populations, and how these result from the processes of fertility, mortality, and migration. The chapters of this book discuss these topics in much more depth and detail and will provide you with a thorough introduction to demography.
I will start this first chapter with the following point: every one of us, you and I, whether we are aware of it or not, have already contributed, and will continue to contribute throughout our lives, to the subject matter of demography. I will next elaborate on the definition of demography introduced above.
9 - International Migration
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
The first “international” migration of humans began around 60,000 years ago, and the migrations continue to this day. Of all the demographic topics presented in this book, none is discussed today by both laypeople and social scientists as frequently and as forcefully as international migration. International migration is migration that occurs between countries. Its dynamics differ from those of internal migration, that is, migration within the geographical boundaries of a single country. Thus, a separate chapter is devoted here to international migration.
I begin this chapter by considering some of the definitions and concepts used in the study of international migration. I next cover world immigration patterns over time. This is followed by a discussion of immigration to the United States. I then consider some of the positive and negative economic issues pertaining to international migration. Considerations of legal and unauthorized immigration are next reviewed. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of the concept of zero net international migration.
DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS
Similar to the study of internal migration, demographers have developed a fairly standard set of concepts and definitions for studying international migration. The first distinction is between immigration and emigration. Immigration refers to the movement of people to a new country for the purpose of establishing permanent residence; an immigrant is a person who moves to a new country to reside there and crosses an international boundary in doing so. These concepts are analogous in the study of internal migration to in-migration and in-migrant. Conversely, emigration refers to the permanent departure of people from a country; an emigrant is one who migrates away from a country with the intention of establishing a permanent residence elsewhere. The analogous internal migration concepts are out-migration and out-migrant.
In every international migration, a migrant is simultaneously an immigrant and an emigrant. The key element in the definition of an immigrant is the establishment of a permanent residence in the new country. This usually means residence in the destination country for at least one year, and is referred to as long-term immigration.
16 - The Earth in the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Centuries
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
You have now read through the first fifteen chapters of this book (I hope you have read all the chapters). You have learned a good deal about population and demography and the world in which we live. You now should know more demography than you did when you first started to read the book. I certainly hope so.
I have discussed the three demographic processes. I have discussed the basic population characteristics, especially age and sex, as well as the family and race/ethnicity. I have discussed population growth as well as population decline. In this final chapter, I look specifically at the population of the Earth, the number of inhabitants on our planet now and in the future. I will inquire how the world population now and in 2100 may be related to other major factors of life on Earth. I will consider the future of the Earth's population from the perspectives of ecology, sociology, and philosophy. Hence, this last chapter has less to do with demography per se and more to do with the influence of population in several other arenas.
In Chapter 12, I considered several different scenarios with respect to the size of the population of our world in the year 2100. I present here as Figure 16.1 the same figure I presented earlier as Figure 12.4. Let me consider the different scenarios to get an idea of what the size of the world's population might be in 2100.
In Chapter 12, I used world population projections prepared recently by the Population Division of the United Nations (2013d). I preferred them over projections prepared by other organizations because, in my view, the UN projections reflect the most reasonable assumptions about future demographic behavior. However, I remind you again, as I have already in Chapter 12, that these are projections about what the population of the world will be in 2100 according to stated assumptions. In no way should they be seen as predictions, nor should they be considered the final word. (Please look back at Chapter 12 for my discussion of the assumptions that guided the development of these UN projections.)
7 - Mortality
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
As population actors, our last and final behavior on this earth is our death. When this demographic event occurs, it will be at least the second time for many of us that we have had our name mentioned in the local newspaper. When we were born, our name was probably listed in the local paper along with the name of our mother and maybe that of our father. But not much else was reported about us when we were born because there was not much to report. However, when we die, not only will our name be listed (again), but also other information will likely be provided in a story, an obituary, about our life. Our obituary might include when and where we were born, our surviving family members, and perhaps something about our main occupation while we were alive, our education, and other items of interest.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “obituary” as an “announcement of a death (in a newspaper)…usually comprising a brief biographical sketch of the deceased” (Simpson and Weiner, 2000: X, 640). What other time will a biographical sketch about you be written and published for everyone to read? Perhaps never. Our death is not only the last event in our life, but, indeed, one of the most important events in our life.
Every one of us has been born, and every one of us will die. This is a certainty. No one escapes death. In fact, all species are born and all species die. But we humans are the only species to actually think about and contemplate the act of dying.
Death will not occur at the same time for everyone. Some of us will die sooner than others. On average, death will come earlier to males than to females, and earlier to members of most racial minority groups than to members of the majority. However, if you are Latino, death will likely come later, not earlier. If you live in the United States and are a Latino female, you will have the longest average longevity (length of life). You will have the shortest longevity if you are an African American male.
Introduction
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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The media these days are rediscovering population dynamics and the subject of demography. The first real heyday for demography was probably in the 1960s and 1970s with the “discovery” of the global population problem. In recent decades, demographic behavior and demographic characteristics have received increased attention in the popular media. And the term demographics has seeped into our vocabulary. This is an encouraging sign. Forty-five years ago when I first began studying and teaching demography, the subject was nowhere near as recognized and discussed as it is today. Now, the importance of population change, in terms of size, composition, and distribution, has become increasingly relevant in policymaking at the local, state, national, and international levels. There is an increasing awareness not only of population growth and decline, but also of compositional change in age, sex, and racial identity.
Care must be taken, however, to evaluate the works of journalists and others who use, or fail to use, demographic data, and nevertheless comment about demography and its dynamics. It is very easy to make errors when reporting on and interpreting population behavior. Hopefully, readers of this book will become attuned to these types of errors, which seem to appear every so often in the popular media.
Population and Society: An Introduction to Demography is intended for undergraduate students, as well as graduate students, taking their first course in demography. It is sociologically oriented, although economics, political science, geography, history, and the other social sciences are also used to inform some of the materials I cover and discuss. While the emphasis is on demography, I well recognize that at the individual level, population change is related to private decisions, especially in relation to fertility but also to migration and even to mortality. I thus consider in some detail, early in the book, the role of individuals in population decision-making. At the level of countries, and even the world, changes in population size have an important effect on environmental and related challenges facing all the world's inhabitants. I often wonder why the media, when discussing issues such as global warming or immigration, tend sometimes to minimize the role of demography and demographic data and patterns.
14 - Population Distribution
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
Whether looking at the planet Earth, Africa, or the United States, it is clear that the population is far from being equally distributed. The distinguished demographer Mark Fossett has written that “structured patterns in spatial distribution are evident from the highest levels of macrospatial scale…to ‘fine-grained’ patterns in metropolitan areas…and nonmetropolitan hinterlands” (2005: 479).
Most know that China's population is more than 1.3 billion, and that the population of the United States is around 321 million. However, many may not be aware that China and the United States are very close in geographic size. China has 9.6 million km2 of surface area compared with the United States with 9.8 million km2. But the populations in both countries are not distributed randomly. Most of the people in both countries live in the eastern regions. However, the distribution in China is far more concentrated in the eastern half of the country, where 90 percent of the population resides. A night-time satellite map for the United States (Figure 14.1) shows that much more than 10 percent of the US population resides in the western half of the country, unlike the situation in China.
In some countries, people are more likely to be rural than urban dwellers. Generally, however, there is an urbanization movement throughout the world: “Without question, the dominant feature of spatial distribution in the United States and other developed countries is the concentration of population in densely settled urban areas” (Fossett, 2005: 479). For that matter, the way in which cities have evolved is a quite interesting phenomenon. In this chapter, I examine how the inhabitants of the world are distributed, and how most of us have become city dwellers rather than cave dwellers, as was the case thousands of years ago.
DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD
Only about one-third of the Earth's land is permanently inhabited. Areas such as the Arctic and the Antarctic, as well as the vast deserts such as the Sahara, have very few people. The situation is similar where rugged mountains make it almost impossible for humans to survive. The geographic distribution of the global population is shown in Table 14.1. South Asia (mainly India) and east Asia (mainly China) are the most populated of the world regions, and Oceania (primarily Australia) is the least.
2 - Theories of Demography
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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INTRODUCTION
Demographers have developed several theories or explanations about why and how populations change their size. Many have written about world population growth and decline. In this chapter I consider first the general meaning of the term “population.” Then, I review the works of some of the early writers who discussed population and population change. Since Malthus is perhaps the most well known of the early scholars, I discuss him and his writings in some detail. I follow my discussion of Malthus with a somewhat shorter discussion of Karl Marx. I then turn to a detailed discussion of demographic transition theory (DTT) and its major extensions. Finally, I discuss some of the principal theories and perspectives that demographers have developed that focus specifically and separately on fertility, mortality and migration.
WHAT IS A POPULATION?
Demography is the study of human populations. The word population is from the Latin populare, to populate, and the Latin noun, populatio. McNicoll has written that in ancient times, the verb populare “commonly meant to lay waste, plunder, or ravage,” and the noun populatio “was a plundering or despoliation” (2003: 730). These usages became obsolete by the eighteenth century. According to Landry (1945), the modern use of the word population first appeared in 1597 in an essay by Francis Bacon (McNicoll, 2003).
Strictly speaking, a population is a group or collection of items. To a demographer, a population is a group or collection of people. Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot (2001: 1) have distinguished between a specific population or group of actual people alive at a given period of time (e.g., the population of China as of November 1, 2010) and the population that persists over time even though its actual members may change (e.g., the population of China during the past 4,000 years). But as McNicoll has noted, the more common use of the term population by demographers and in modern English usage is with regard to a “well-defined set, with clear-cut membership criteria” (2003: 731), such as the population of the People's Republic of China as identified and enumerated in its 2010 census on November 1, 2010.
11 - Race and Ethnicity
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- 28 December 2016, pp 312-331
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INTRODUCTION
This chapter deals with the demography of race and ethnicity. I am mainly concerned here with demographic issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, their implications and consequences. I first discuss why demographers are interested in race and ethnicity. I then review briefly the history of categorizing people according to race and ethnicity. I follow with a discussion of how in the United States the statistical concepts of race and ethnicity evolved over time, from the 1790 census to the 2010 census, resulting in the five race/ethnic categories used today in the US federal government system. I then examine current patterns of race and ethnicity in the United States. Finally, given that the United States is a nation of immigrants and that the future growth of the US population is due directly and indirectly to immigration, I conclude the chapter with a detailed discussion of some of the sociological and demographic perspectives that have been used to discuss racial and ethnic adaptation. In my mind, adaptation is a key concern for Americans, particularly as by the mid-2040s, the United States will have become a majority-minority country, that is, a country where the NH-white population will no longer be the majority.
WHY DO DEMOGRAPHERS STUDY RACE AND ETHNICITY?
Very early in Chapter 1 of this book, I wrote that one of the concerns of demography is with “how populations are composed according to age, sex, race, marital status, and other characteristics.” My interest in the present chapter, and in the previous chapter, is with features of population composition. In Chapter 10, I focused on two very important aspects of composition, age and sex. In this chapter, I cover yet another feature of population composition, race and ethnicity. So why are demographers so interested in the race and ethnicity of human populations? What is it about race and ethnicity that is so important for demography?
Do you remember in Chapter 1 my discussion of the basic demographic equation? It will be worth our time for me to spend a few paragraphs here discussing it again.
Subject Index
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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8 - Internal Migration
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- 28 December 2016, pp 215-235
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
In earlier chapters, I discussed two of the three ways that populations change their size. People are added to a population through fertility and are taken away through mortality. I now turn to the third and last way that populations change their size, namely, migration. Persons may be added to a population by moving into it or be subtracted from it by moving away from it. Unlike a birth and a death, which occur to each of us once and only once, migration may occur on multiple occasions, or we may never experience migration.
There are two main types of migration, namely, within a country and between countries. The former is internal migration, and the latter, international migration. The dynamics of the two kinds of migration differ significantly, and many of their concepts and theories are also different. Although their theories are more or less governed by “push” and “pull” factors (as I have mentioned in Chapter 2), they differ in their emphasis and focus. In this chapter, I cover internal migration. In Chapter 9, I cover international migration.
Internal migration is the change of permanent residence within a country, involving a geographical move that crosses a political boundary, usually a county or county-type geographical unit. However, not all changes in residence are migrations. Indeed, demographers distinguish between movers and migrants. Any person who changes residence, whether the change involves moving across the street or moving from Maine to Hawaii, is a mover. A migrant is a person whose residential move involves the crossing of a political boundary. The US Bureau of the Census defines migration occurring within the United States as residential “moves that cross jurisdictional boundaries (counties in particular)” (Mateyka, 2015: 3). This definition of an internal migrant is generally the definition used worldwide; any persons who change residence by moving from one county (or county-type unit) to another is a migrant. Bear in mind that all migrants are movers, but not all movers are migrants.
References
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- Book:
- Population and Society
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- 12 September 2018
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- 28 December 2016, pp 455-499
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Contents
- Dudley L. Poston, Jr, Texas A & M University, Leon F. Bouvier, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- Book:
- Population and Society
- Published online:
- 12 September 2018
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- 28 December 2016, pp v-x
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