Muslim Fertility Rates Pose Grave Concerns About Islamic Population Increases

The news announced last week that the worldwide Muslim population will increase at double at the rate of non-Muslims over the next 20 years has alarmed immigration restrictionists. According to the findings of the Pew Research Center and the John Templeton Foundation in their jointly authored report titled The Future of the Global Muslim Population, Projections for 2010-2030, the numbers of Muslims in the United States will more than double, from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030. Correspondingly, the percentage of native-born Muslims in the United States is projected to rise from 35 percent today to 45 percent in 2030. Since a large percentage of Islamic countries whose citizens may immigrate to the U.S. have ties to terrorist organizations, the Pew report has put many of our allies in the immigration “enforcement and border security first” community as well as other concerned Americans on guard. For the purposes of this essay only, however, I’m going to ignore potential terrorist implications and focus instead on why significant statistical increases in any demographic segment of the U. S. population, including Muslims, is bad for a sustainable America. Immigration into America from Muslim countries has, even post-9/11, remained relatively easy, aided greatly by chain migration. Pew found that Muslim immigration to the United States has steadily increased since the 1990s, except for a slight dip in 2011 following the 9/11 New York terrorist attacks. In 1992, nearly 50,000 Muslim immigrants were granted permanent residency status. By 2009, the annual number had increased to more than 115,000. If current trends continue, Pew estimates that about 130,000 Muslims will be granted permanent residency annually by 2030. Muslim immigrants have over the last decade risen both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of all immigrants receiving permanent residency. As Muslims arrived from all corners of the world, they have established ethnic enclaves wherein they dominate certain cities like, for example, Dearborn, Michigan where as much as 30 percent of the population is Islamic. One community within Dearborn, Southend, is nearly 98 percent Muslim. Los Angeles may have the second largest Iranian population in the world behind Tehran. Another major city, Detroit, has a diverse Muslim concentration of Lebanese, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Yemenis. Tens of thousands of Somalis live in Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio. One thing that most Muslims bring with them from their native land is a pattern to have large numbers of children, an obvious detriment to stabilizing America’s growth which is already projected to reach 550 million people by 2100. Here according to the CIA World Factbook are the birth rates per 1,000 persons from some Muslim countries: Afghanistan, 45.5, Somalia, 43.7; Yemin, 42.1; Iraq, 30.1; Saudi Arabia, 28.6 and Pakistan, 27.6. All are at least two to four times as high as the U.S., listed in the Factbook at 13.8. Advocates for stable U.S. population face enough challenges in our efforts to encourage smaller family size without a steady increase of foreign-born nationals who believe, for personal and possibly political reasons, that larger is better.