| ■ U.S. Population to Hit 300 Million | 06.10.23 |
| The population of the United States is expected to hit 300 million on Tuesday. The number will be reached at precisely 7:46 a.m. EDT, according to U.S. Census bureau projections of births, deaths and net immigration. The projections also add up to one new American every 11 seconds, the Associated Press reported Sunday. America is still a land of wide-open spaces: there are about 84 people per square mile, compared with 300 people per square mile in the European Union and almost 900 people per square mile in Japan. But a little more than half of the U.S. population is clustered along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. The fastest growing county is Flagler County, Fla., north of Daytona Beach; the fastest growing city is Elk Grove, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento; and the fastest growing metropolitan area is Riverside, Calif., about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, the Census Bureau reports. An estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants are included in the official U.S. population estimate, which reached its last milestone, 200 million, in 1967. That translates into a 50 percent increase in 39 years, the AP reported. During that same period, the number of households nearly doubled, the number of motor vehicles more than doubled and the miles driven in those vehicles nearly tripled. In addition, the average household size has shrunk from 3.3 people to 2.6 people, and the share of households with only one person has jumped from fewer than 16 percent to about 27 percent. The United States is the third largest country in the world, behind China and India. It is also the fastest growing industrialized nation, adding about 2.8 million people a year, or just under 1 percent. About 40 percent of the U.S. population growth comes from immigration, both legal and illegal, according to the Census Bureau. The rest comes from births outnumbering deaths. |