Background
The United States is already the third most populous nation on the planet and will contribute more to global population growth by mid-century than any other nations except Nigeria and India (the US is projected to add 133 million people by 2050 ).

The magnitude of this population’s ongoing growth is troubling in terms of both domestic and planetary sustainability issues -- due to its extremely wasteful and polluting habits of consumption. As an example, the US population constitutes only 5% of the global population but annually accounts for 22% of global carbon emissions, throws away over 200 million tons of municipal waste and uses 24% of global energy production while destroying 1.2 million acres of its farmland per year .

Furthermore, the US bio-capacity – its domestic surface area available to produce resources and assimilate waste – provides only 48% of the population’s annual subsistence. 52% is provided by importing bio-capacity, drawing down resource reserves, and degrading habitat .

Like all sovereign nations, US population fluctuations in any given year are the results from the net of gain from natural increase and net migration. Its generally accepted that the US has officially added over 3 million people per year during the current decade. For example, the net increase in 2005 was broken down as:

• Natural increase: 1.9 million people per year
• Net legal immigration: 1.2 million per year

However, special note should be made regarding the relatively high fertility of recent immigrants compared to native citizens, and the complex additive effects that ongoing net legal immigration of over 1 million plus persons and their future fertility have on the rate of natural increase. 82% of the US population increase by 2050 will result from immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants .
Specific legal mechanisms to manage natural increase do not exist. Instead the variations of this rate result from a complex of societal tendencies and countless individual and organizational decisions. This is not to say the rate of natural increase cannot be manipulated by determined entities, but only that it does not enjoy a single point of policy control like migration: it is the sole province of the US Congress, as elected representative of this sovereign nation, to set migration policy as it sees fit.

Public Policy Position
Celebrating and admiring the positive contributions that representatives of planet’s diverse cultures and ethnicities make to the Unites States upon joining our citizenry, NECSP welcomes legal immigration into the US at a rate that promotes stabilized domestic population.

As current US migration policy precludes a stabilized national population, NECSP petitions the US Congress to alter it so that in any given year the number of people invited into our nation is roughly equal to those who freely chose to leave the previous year. (Population Reference Bureau gauges that inviting 300,000 people into the US per year would serve to balance those emigrants that choose to leave).

Special Notes
NECSP notes that our public policy position on this matter should be viewed in the context of filling the unmet need for a comprehensive US national population policy, this position being one component of such a policy.

NECSP notes that there are countless individual American citizens and organizations who, based on environmental & sustainability concerns, are advocating for migration policies similar to our own. We consider such advocates “sustainable population advocates” and welcome them as colleagues and constituents.

NECSP notes that population growth in the US does not occur in a vacuum, and that advocating merely for stabilizing population in the US is an unbalanced approach to striving for planetary sustainable development. We strongly urge and support efforts to reduce global fertility to 2.1 or below as soon as possible, so long as all such reduction are achieved voluntarily by promoting the idea of, and/or objectively removing the barriers to unconstrained access to family planning services and contraception to all those who want them -- the education of women being a paramount objective in these goals.