New poll finds Americans still want far less Population Growth 40 years after government commission called for stabilization

DALLAS (April 20, 2012) – Forty years after a multi-year bi-partisan
government commission
recommended slowing U.S. population growth and eventually stabilizing,
Americans still would like to see it happen, according to poll results
to be released this weekend at the 2012 Earth Day Dallas festival.

Take the survey now!
See the survey results.

“On the 40th anniversary of that landmark event in the early
environmental movement, we wanted to know if Americans today share that
commission’s conclusion that massive U.S. population growth is harmful
to the environment and unwanted by the citizenry,” said Roy Beck,
President of the NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation which
commissioned the national poll by Dallas-based Pulse Opinion Research.

The new poll found that Americans aren’t happy that the population has
never stopped expanding (from just over 200 million in 1970 to more than
300 million); 52% say the extra 100 million has damaged the
environment, contrasted to 6% who say it brought improvement.

The new poll found only 10% of U.S. voters approve the current rate of growth that
the Census Bureau states will double U.S. population from 313 million
today to over 600 million by the end of the century.

Given two other options, 35% of Americans chose cutting the rate of
growth in half, and 46% said they would prefer no more population growth
at all.

Of the nearly half of Americans who want no more population growth, one
of four said they would like to see the population slowly become
smaller to the 250 million size of 1990, and one of six preferred the
200 million size of 1970.

The misgivings shown by Americans today are similar to what Americans
indicated in a national poll by “The Commission on Population Growth and
the American Future,” which was created just before the first Earth Day
(1970) and issued its final report in spring of 1972. Leaders from
labor, business, civil rights and environmental activists, religion and
academe contributed to the report.

The 1972 poll found 57% of Americans believed U.S. population growth was environmentally harmful.

66% disapproved of adding another 100 million people.

56% said government should try to do something to slow down population growth.

57% said people should limit the size of their families even though they can afford a large number of children.

50% said the number of immigrants should be reduced, with only 3% saying the numbers should increase.

“Census data show that our population would be stabilizing at around 250
million if the American people had controlled things, given that their
average family size has been at a zero-population-growth level ever
since 1972,” said Beck, who as one of the nation’s first
environment-beat journalists reported on
the population debates in the late 1960s and 1970s. “Successive
Congresses have adopted immigration increases that only 3% of Americans
wanted in 1972. They have tripled immigration numbers and created a
level of population growth that two-thirds of Americans said they
opposed. Despite near-silence about population issues in the public
discussions of our present era, this 40th anniversary poll shows that
Americans still solidly oppose their government forcing major population
growth on them.”

Other findings in the new poll:

68% of voters said immigration should be reduced in order to slow U.S.
population growth; 19% prefer to keep immigration the same and let it
double the U.S. population; 4% prefer increasing immigration so that
population would more than double this century.

The poll informed respondents that “current levels of immigration could
continue without causing population growth if Americans would cut their
average family size from two children to one. Just 9% of Americans said
that would be a good idea.

71% said that if the population in the area where they live doubles
along with the national doubling projected by the Census Bureau, the
quality of life in their area would worsen.

The expectation of worsening from population doubling was found in the
overwhelming majority of voters in every region of the country and
regardless of whether people live in a large, medium or small city, a
suburb, a town or rural area. It also was found at similar levels across
all religious, income, age, political party and ideology groupings.

Hispanic voters were similar to all other voters in their opposition to
high population growth and in preference for a stabilizing population
size.
Take the survey now!
See the survey results.The national telephone survey of 1,000 adults was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research in April, 2012. Pulse Opinion Research, LLC is an
independent public opinion research firm using automated polling
methodology and procedures licensed from Rasmussen Reports, LLC. The
margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 3% percentage points
with a 95% level of confidence.

NumbersUSA is a non-partisan, non-profit organization headquartered in
Arlington, Virginia. It was founded in 1996 to promote the
immigration/population recommendations of President Clinton’s commission
on sustainability and of the bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration
Reform, chaired by the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. NumbersUSA has
more than a million registered on-line members.