Demography and Population
Read this text on three demographic factors: fertility rate, mortality rate, and migration patterns. Figure 20.4 documents the mass migration crisis in the United States. Table 20.1 highlights fertility and mortality rates in different countries. Pay attention to the theories on population: Malthusian, cornucopian, zero population growth, and demographic transition theories. How have attitudes in the United States changed on immigration?
Figure 20.1 A view from space makes it easy to see differences in population. Lighted areas are urban centers containing larger and larger portions of the world's population. Darker areas are sparsely populated. Beyond the global scale, the differences within regions are notable. Africa is mostly empty of light, with the exception of a few densely populated areas to the south, west, and north. India is almost clearly outlined by its lights, showing a stark contrast with the nations to its north and west, with a line of light indicating the cities along the Indus River in Pakistan. The United States almost seems to be split in half at the line formed by Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Wichita.
Fracking, another word for hydraulic fracturing, is a method used to recover gas and oil from shale by drilling down into the earth and directing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals into the rock. While energy companies view fracking as a profitable revolution in the industry, there are a number of concerns associated with the practice.
First, fracking requires huge amounts of water. Water transportation comes at a high environmental cost. Once mixed with fracking chemicals, water is unsuitable for human and animal consumption. However, between 10 percent and 90 percent of the contaminated water is estimated to be returned to the water cycle. Second, the chemicals used in a fracking mix are potentially carcinogenic. These chemicals may pollute groundwater near the extraction site. Industry leaders suggest that such contamination is unlikely and that when it does occur, it is incidental and related to unavoidable human error rather than an expected risk of the practice. Still, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's study of fracking is ongoing. The third concern is that fracking causes minor earthquakes by undermining the seismic stability of an area, though far more induced earthquakes are caused by traditional oil and gas production (USGS n.d.) Finally, gas is not a renewable source of energy; this is a negative in the eyes of those who oppose continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Fracking is not without its advantages. Its supporters offer statistics that suggest it reduces unemployment and contributes to economic growth. Since it allows energy companies access previously nonviable and untapped oil and gas reserves, fracking boosts domestic oil production and lowers energy costs. Finally, since natural gas is a lower-emission fuel than coal, fracking reduces the airborne environmental impacts of industrial energy.
One complexity of lower-priced natural gas production is that demand for coal has plummeted. Coal is both more expensive to produce and more environmentally damaging than natural gas, and the coal industry is concentrated in a few areas, such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Automation had already depleted the employment opportunities in the industry; decades before fracking became widespread, coal companies began widespread replacement of people with machines. Although the United States was producing more coal than it had in previous decades, it was doing so with fewer workers than it ever had. At its peak, the coal industry employed nearly a million people, and its thriving towns drove other businesses. By 2015, the industry employs about 50,000 people. Inexpensive natural gas is another factor contributing to the industry's continued issues. Coal companies continually shutter, and entire regions are full of newly laid-off workers who cannot find employment.
As you read this chapter, consider how an increasing global population can balance environmental concerns with industrial and economic growth opportunities. Think about how much water pollution can be justified by the need to lower U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. Is the economic growth associated with fracking worth some environmental degradation? As we see a related industry – coal – further diminished due to fracking, do we owe its workers some compensation or additional support?
Figure 20.2 This is a Marcellus shale gas-drilling site in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.
As the discussion of fracking illustrates, important societal issues are connected to the environment and how and where people live. Sociologists begin to examine these issues through demography, or the study of population and how it relates to urbanization, the study of cities' social, political, and economic relationships. Environmental sociologists look at the study of how humans interact with their environments. Today, as has been the case many times in history, we are at a point of conflict in a number of these areas.
The world's population reached seven billion between 2011 and 2012. When will it reach eight billion? Can our planet sustain such a population? We generate more trash than ever, from Starbucks cups to obsolete cell phones containing toxic chemicals to food waste that could be composted. You may be unaware of where your trash ends up. And while this problem exists worldwide, trash issues are often more acute in urban areas. Cities and city living create new challenges for both society and the environment that make interactions between people and places of critical importance.
How do sociologists study population and urbanization issues? Functionalist sociologists might focus on how all aspects of population, urbanization, and the environment serve as vital and cohesive elements, ensuring the continuing stability of society. They might study how the growth of the global population encourages emigration and immigration and how emigration and immigration serve to strengthen ties between nations. Or they might research how migration affects environmental issues; for example, how have forced migrations and the resulting changes in a region's ability to support a new group affected both the displaced people and the area of relocation? Another topic a functionalist might research is how various urban neighborhoods specialize in serving cultural and financial needs.
A conflict theorist interested in the creation and reproduction of inequality might ask how peripheral nations' lack of family planning affects their overall population compared to core nations with lower fertility rates. Or, how do inner cities become ghettos, nearly devoid of jobs, education, and other opportunities? A conflict theorist might also study environmental racism and other forms of environmental inequality. For example, which parts of New Orleans society were the most responsive to the evacuation order during Hurricane Katrina? Which area was most affected by the flooding? And where (and in what conditions) were people from those areas housed, both during and before the evacuation?
A symbolic interactionist interested in the day-to-day interaction of groups and individuals might research topics like how family-planning information is presented to and understood by different population groups and how people experience and understand urban life. The language people use to convince others of the presence (or absence) of global climate change. For example, some politicians wish to present the study of global warming as junk science, and other politicians insist it is a proven fact.
Demography and Population
Figure 20.3 At nearly eight billion, Earth's population is always on the move, but the methods vary. As you see here, bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are more common in Vietnam than they are in many U.S. cities. And in some countries, masks were common well before COVID-19.
Between 2011 and 2012, we reached a population milestone of seven billion humans on the earth's surface. The rapidity with which this happened demonstrated an exponential increase from the time it took to grow from five billion to six billion people. In short, the planet is filling up. We will have eight billion people in this decade. While the population is increasing overall, certain countries and regions are slowing growth. Relocation and migration also change the makeup and quantity of people in an area. In order to properly understand these dynamics and make decisions regarding them, we turn to demography, or the study of populations. Three critical aspects of demography are fertility, mortality, and migration.
The fertility rate of a society is a measure noting the number of children born. The fertility number is generally lower than the fecundity number, which measures the potential number of children that could be born to women of childbearing age. Sociologists measure fertility using the crude birthrate (the number of live births per 1,000 people per year). Just as fertility measures childbearing, the mortality rate is a measure of the number of people who die. The crude death rate is a number derived from the number of deaths per 1,000 people per year. When analyzed together, fertility and mortality rates help researchers understand the overall growth occurring in a population.
Another key element in studying populations is the movement of people into and out of an area. Migration may take the form of immigration, which describes movement into an area to take up permanent residence, or emigration, which refers to movement out of an area to another place of permanent residence. Migration might be voluntary (as when college students study abroad), involuntary (as when Syrians evacuated war-torn areas), or forced (as when many Native American tribes were removed from the lands they'd lived in for generations).
Big Picture
Mass Migration Crises
Figure 20.4 This March 2021 image of dozens of children in plastic-lined holding areas was one of a group of photos that sparked a public outcry in the early days of the Biden administration, years after similar scenes and situations in the 2014 and 2018 border crises.
At least once during each of the last three Presidential administrations, the United States has faced a crisis at its southern border. While images of children in crowded holding areas, covered in piles of shiny plastic emergency blankets, were often associated with the Trump Presidency, Presidents Obama and Biden saw children in the same conditions. The holding facilities, described as cages by some and often referred to as perreras (dog kennels) or hieleras (ice boxes) by the migrating people, are meant to be temporary stopovers.
At the same time, people await hearings or related refugee processes. But on a number of occasions, the number of people crossing the border was so large – including, at times, tens of thousands of children – that the system became overwhelmed. The conditions are deplorable. The outcomes are uncertain. But the people cross the border anyway.
How did we get here? Bipartisan legislation passed in 2008 guarantees unaccompanied minors a hearing with an immigration judge where they may request asylum based on a "credible" fear of persecution or torture. In some cases, these children are looking for relatives and can be placed with family while awaiting a hearing on their immigration status; in other cases, they become involved with the foster system or are placed in one of the 170 housing facilities run by nonprofit or for-profit groups.
Finally, people who turn 18 while still in the process may be transferred to detention centers, sometimes on their birthday. Many people in America were either accepting or unaware of these policies and situations until crises occurred in 2014 and 2018-19. At those points of incredible influxes of migrant children, border control, refugee services, and advocacy organizations were overwhelmed by the surge. Both the Obama and Trump administrations pushed for changes in laws or guidelines for enforcement.
The Obama administration sought to make the decision process faster. In 2014, over 50,000 unaccompanied minors were taken into custody, creating the backlog discussed above. The Trump administration sought to discourage immigration through policies such as separating parents and children who arrived together. The policy was decried by members of Trump's own party and many other organizations and was eventually dealt a series of legal blows before the President reversed it. Later investigations determined that hundreds, if not thousands, of children remained separated from their parents for extended periods of time.
While the situations at the border are extremely threatening to children's health and safety, people and policymakers in the United States are divided on how to address the situation. In many cases, these children are fleeing various kinds of violence and extreme poverty. The U.S. government has repeatedly indicated that the best way to avoid these crises is to address those conditions in the migrants' home countries. But even with financial aid for those nations and pressure on their governments to crack down on illegal activity, it is unlikely that the situation will change quickly or consistently. The Biden administration may not be the last to face a surge of immigrant children at its border.
A functional perspective theorist might focus on the dysfunctions caused by the sudden influx of underage asylum seekers. In contrast, a conflict perspective theorist might look at how social stratification influences how the members of a developed country treat the lower-status migrants from less-developed countries in Latin America. An interactionist theorist might see significance in the attitude of those protesting the presence of migrant children. Which theoretical perspective makes the most sense to you?
Population Growth
Changing fertility, mortality, and migration rates make up the total population composition, a snapshot of the demographic profile of a population. This number can be measured for societies, nations, world regions, or other groups. The population composition includes the sex ratio, the number of men for every hundred women, as well as the population pyramid, a picture of population distribution by sex and age (Figure 20.5).
Figure 20.5 This population pyramid shows the breakdown of the 2019 U.S. population according to age and sex.
| Country | Population (in millions) | Fertility Rate (number of children per adult woman) | Mortality Rate (per 1,000 births) | Sex Ratio Male to Female |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Afghanistan | 38.4 | 4.4 | 48 | 1.05 |
| Finland | 5.52 | 1.4 | 2.0 | 1.04 |
| United States of America | 328.3 | 1.7 | 5.7 | 0.97 |
Table 20.1 Varying Fertility and Mortality Rated by Country. As the table illustrates, countries vary greatly in fertility and mortality rates – the components that comprise a population composition. This data is from 2018, and changes occur continually. For example, in 2014, the number of children per adult woman in Afghanistan was 5.4 – generally an average of one more child per family. And the U.S. was slightly higher at 2.0
Comparing the three countries in Table 20.1 reveals that there are more men than women in Afghanistan and Finland, whereas the reverse is true in the United States. Afghanistan also has significantly higher fertility and mortality rates than either of the other two countries. In all three cases, the fertility rates have dropped in recent years, but Afghanistan's drop (from 5.4 children per woman to 4.4) will likely be the most impactful. Do these statistics surprise you? How do you think the population makeup affects the political climate and economics of the different countries?
Demographic Theories
Sociologists have long looked at population issues as central to understanding human interactions. Below we will look at four theories about population that inform sociological thought: Malthusian, zero population growth, cornucopian, and demographic transition theories.
Malthusian Theory
Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was an English clergyman who made dire predictions about the Earth's ability to sustain its growing population. According to Malthusian theory, three factors would control the human population that exceeded the earth's carrying capacity, or how many people can live in a given area considering the available resources. Malthus identified these factors as war, famine, and disease (Malthus 1798). He termed them "positive checks" because they increase mortality rates, thus keeping the population in check. They are countered by "preventive checks," which also control the population by reducing fertility rates; preventive checks include birth control and celibacy. Thinking practically, Malthus saw that people could produce only so much food in a given year, yet the population was increasing at an exponential rate. Eventually, he thought people would run out of food and begin to starve. They would go to war over increasingly scarce resources and reduce the population to a manageable level, and then the cycle would begin anew.
Of course, this has not exactly happened. The human population has continued to grow long past Malthus's predictions. So what happened? Why didn't we die off? There are three reasons sociologists believe we are continuing to expand the population of our planet. First, technological increases in food production have increased both the amount and quality of calories we can produce per person. Second, human ingenuity has developed new medicine to curtail death from disease. Finally, the development and widespread use of contraception and other forms of family planning have decreased the speed at which our population increases. But what about the future? Some still believe Malthus was correct and that ample resources will soon run out to support the earth's population.
Zero Population Growth
A neo-Malthusian researcher named Paul Ehrlich brought Malthus's predictions into the twentieth century. However, according to Ehrlich, the environment, not specifically the food supply, will play a crucial role in the continued health of the planet's population (Ehrlich 1968). Ehrlich's ideas suggest that the human population is moving rapidly toward complete environmental collapse, as privileged people use up or pollute a number of environmental resources such as water and air. He advocated for a goal of zero population growth (ZPG), in which the number of people entering a population through birth or immigration is equal to the number of people leaving it via death or emigration. While support for this concept is mixed, it is still considered a possible solution to global overpopulation.
Cornucopian Theory
Of course, some theories are less focused on the pessimistic hypothesis that the world's population will meet a detrimental challenge to sustaining itself. Cornucopian theory scoffs at the idea of humans wiping themselves out; it asserts that human ingenuity can resolve any environmental or social issues that develop. As an example, it points to the issue of food supply. The theory contends that if we need more food, agricultural scientists will figure out how to grow it, as they have already been doing for centuries. After all, in this perspective, human ingenuity has been up to the task for thousands of years, and there is no reason for that pattern not to continue.
Demographic Transition Theory
Whether you believe that we are headed for environmental disaster and the end of human existence as we know it, or you think people will always adapt to changing circumstances, we can see clear patterns in population growth. Societies develop along a predictable continuum as they evolve from unindustrialized to postindustrial. Demographic transition theory suggests that future population growth will develop along a predictable four-stage model.
In Stage 1, birth, death, and infant mortality rates are all high, while life expectancy is short. An example of this stage is the 1800s in the United States. As countries begin to industrialize, they enter Stage 2, where birth rates are higher while infant mortality and death rates drop. Life expectancy also increases. Afghanistan is currently in this stage. Stage 3 occurs once a society is thoroughly industrialized; birth rates decline while life expectancy continues to increase. Death rates continue to decrease. Mexico's population is at this stage. In the final phase, Stage 4, we see the postindustrial era of society. Birth and death rates are low, people are healthier and live longer, and society enters a phase of population stability. The overall population may even decline. For example, Sweden is considered to be in Stage 4.
The United Nations Population Fund (2008) categorizes nations as high fertility, intermediate fertility, or low fertility. The United Nations (UN) anticipates that population growth will triple between 2011 and 2100 in high-fertility countries, which are currently concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. For countries with intermediate fertility rates (the United States, India, and Mexico all fall into this category), growth is expected to be about 26 percent. And low-fertility countries like China, Australia, and most of Europe will actually see population declines of approximately 20 percent. The graphs below illustrate this trend.
Changes in U.S. Immigration Patterns and Attitudes
Figure 20.6 Projected Population in Africa This graph shows the population growth of countries located on the African continent, many of which have high fertility rates.
Figure 20.7 Projected Population in the United States The United States has an intermediate fertility rate and a comparatively moderate projected population growth.
Figure 20.8 Projected Population in Europe This chart shows the projected population growth of Europe for the remainder of this century.
Worldwide patterns of migration have changed, though the United States remains the most popular destination. From 1990 to 2013, the number of migrants living in the United States increased from one in six to one in five. The United States is home to about 45 million foreign-born people, while only about three million U.S. citizens live abroad. Of foreign-born citizens emigrating to the United States, 55 percent originated in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, over the past few years, more people from Asian countries have entered than from Latin American ones.
While more foreign-born people legally reside in the United States, as of 2017, about 10.5 million resided here without legal status. Most U.S. immigrants live in Texas, Florida, or California.
Even before policy changes and COVID-19 affected refugee admittance, a relatively small number of people formally entered the country as refugees. In 2016, about 85,000 refugees were admitted to the U.S. (of over one million total immigrants), with the largest portion arriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo; in 2020, the number of refugees was reduced to 18,000.
Most citizens agree that our national immigration policies need adjustment. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of those in a recent national survey believed illegal immigrants should have a path to citizenship provided they meet other requirements, such as paying taxes and passing a background check. Even more people (72 percent) supported passing a DREAM Act, which would allow people who immigrated as children to earn citizenship. In both parts of the survey, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents, supported the pathway to citizenship.
Source: Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang; OpenStax, https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/20-1-demography-and-population
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.