Anti-Immigrant USA: How LOW can the population be with OTL borders?

Keep the USA the same size. What is the minimum amount of people the USA could have by 2016 for this to still be possible? How strong can this depopulated USA be?

Some Founding Fathers, like Ben Franklin, were anti-immigrant, believing even Germans to be impossible to assimilate. I don't think its ASB for the USA to have low immigration from the start while still desiring continental expansion.

Super_Cool said:

Some Founding Fathers, like Ben Franklin, were anti-immigrant, believing even Germans to be impossible to assimilate. I don't think its ASB for the USA to have low immigration from the start while still desiring continental expansion.

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I think it is pretty ASB-ish. Hint: all countries in the Americas encouraged immigration from Europe. That's why nearly all countries in the Americas have jus soli citizenship, where nearly all countries outside the Americas don't. (The Dominican Republic is moving away from that, brutally, but that's a recent anti-Haitian trend.) The US enacted strict immigration controls at about the earliest time there was mass immigration of people who were truly different began, i.e. the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I recall reading somewhere that if there was absolutely no immigration after US independence population about half of OTL. I can't remember the source, though.

It would be pretty difficult for the U.S. to enforce strict immigration limits for much of its early history - it just had too much of a shoreline to patrol and not that much of a military/police force. Restricting immigration became more feasible later on, and Asian immigration in particular was limited from the late 19th century onward, but to sharply control immigration from everywhere in the world would have been a challenge.

But in any event, note that the U.S. population was about 95 million at the time of World War I and 135 million in World War II (compared to 320 million today) and still it was a global power.

funnyhat said:

It would be pretty difficult for the U.S. to enforce strict immigration limits for much of its early history - it just had too much of a shoreline to patrol and not that much of a military/police force. Restricting immigration became more feasible later on, and Asian immigration in particular was limited from the late 19th century onward, but to sharply control immigration from everywhere in the world would have been a challenge.

But in any event, note that the U.S. population was about 95 million at the time of World War I and 135 million in World War II (compared to 320 million today) and still it was a global power.

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Well yeah I mean the rest of the world's countries had smaller populations at that time as well.

China had 416 million people in 1907 and almost 1.4 billion today.

Mitchell Hundred said:

Well yeah I mean the rest of the world's countries had smaller populations at that time as well.

China had 416 million people in 1907 and almost 1.4 billion today.

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Since 1800, US population has grown by a factor of 60, more than that of any other country. This was not entirely due to immigration: the ethnic groups that existed in the late 18c (English, Scotch-Irish, blacks, Dutch, Native Americans, some Germans) are around 35% of US population, or 110 million people, That's not counting the Anglo-Saxon halves of people of mixed Anglo-Saxon and other descent (Italian, Irish, etc.) who identify with the more ethnically marked half. That's still a factor of 21, which is less than Canada and Australia (which received substantial immigration) but probably more than any other country in the world.

I was referring to his point about where the US found itself in the earlier part of the 20th century. Near a hundred million people was indeed very large for a country during that period. Even if it sounds somewhat pedestrian right now for a super-power.

The US population did grow at a pretty astounding rate from the late 18th century on-wards.

The Thirteen Colonies were growing at an astounding rate from the moment of first settlement - the white population had a doubling time of 23 years in the 18c, despite minimal immigration.

Alon said:

The Thirteen Colonies were growing at an astounding rate from the moment of first settlement - the white population had a doubling time of 23 years in the 18c, despite minimal immigration.

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It should be noted the US african population or slave population also grew at a relatively atypical rate compared to other western hemisphere nations.

The US received only a small percentage really of the slaves brought over from Africa but their natural population growth was quite high.

Blacks accounted for 19% of the total population 1790 and 14.1% by the start of the civil war.

Dementor said:

I recall reading somewhere that if there was absolutely no immigration after US independence population about half of OTL. I can't remember the source, though.

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that seems likely... one of my books on the War of 1812 noted that there was a severe labor shortage during that conflict, and wages were pretty high, a fact that bedeviled the British army (deserters all over the place)...

Dave Howery said:

that seems likely... one of my books on the War of 1812 noted that there was a severe labor shortage during that conflict, and wages were pretty high, a fact that bedeviled the British army (deserters all over the place)...

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Labor shortages were something that marked the US experience well into the 19th century. A lot of popular appeal (questions of efficacy aside) of protectionism in the US was protecting relatively high US wages against cheap labor in Britain and Europe.

This line of reasoning was actually used well into the 1920's by American politicians.

ManintheField said:

Labor shortages were something that marked the US experience well into the 19th century. A lot of popular appeal (questions of efficacy aside) of protectionism in the US was protecting relatively high US wages against cheap labor in Britain and Europe.

This line of reasoning was actually used well into the 1920's by American politicians.

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wonder how much of that had to do also with the vast US expansion... with a constant influx of new territory that required a lot of work, labor shortages seem to be a natural result...

Dave Howery said:

wonder how much of that had to do also with the vast US expansion... with a constant influx of new territory that required a lot of work, labor shortages seem to be a natural result...

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Yep, that's a big part of it. Not the whole story, of course, but a big part. It's about alternative choice/opportunity cost. You HAVE to pay your workers a lot if they have the alternative of setting off West and working their own land. (EDIT: That is, you have to pay them more than their subjective evaluation of the benefit of setting off west to work their own land: an open frontier with cheap land raises the 'reservation wage' of prospective employees and employers have to big above that reservation wage to successfully get hires)

The 'problem' also generalizes: A society with a relatively small population but a great deal of capital is going to have pay workers a lot because they have so many other alternatives other than working for one particular employer.

This is just the underlying framework of supply and demand: A high capital stock demands a lot of labor, which raises its price, other things being equal. It also highlights just how quickly the US was growing in the 19th century, when you consider the huge influx of immigrants/dizzying birthrates over the course of that century against a relatively stable/increasing cost of labor.

A US that stayed low net immigration throughout the 19th century is going to have an almost prohibitive cost of labor. The industrial development that does happen will look more like that of the 1820's and 1830's, rather than the burgeoning behemoth of the 1870's and 1880's. It will be extremely capital intensive with an intense focus on energy consumption and mechanized production. That's kind of scary because those are trends that already existed. There's going to be a tipping point where the US simply can't import capital at the rate that it's being demanded, which is going to cut off development as the cost of capital rises.

The US will go into the 20th century looking more like Scandinavia: Relatively poorer, relatively more rural, but quickly developing as capital scarcity cuts off wage growth, lowering the overall cost of labor vis the rest of the industrialized world.

The problem is that the US, historically, had a lot of problems with its capital markets that Scandinavia didn't share. The US' financial system would have to see serious reform away from the strangled system of OTL in order to enjoy the early 20th century takeoff the Scandinavians did.