Straining the stork with 300 millionth

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The U.S. Census Bureau says it expects the nation's population to reach 300 million on Tuesday, 39 years after the 200 million mark was reached and 91 years after the county's population hit 100 million.

The 300 millionth person will enter a country that's much different than it was in 1967, when Life magazine designated the birth of Robert "Bobby" Ken Woo Jr. as a population milestone, naming him the nation's 200-millionth resident.

"In 1970, immigrants constituted less than 5 percent of the U.S. population," said William Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution, adding that today, they are 12.1 percent.

When the population reached 200 million on Nov. 20, 1967, there was no accurate tally of Hispanics in the United States. The first effort to count them came in the 1970 census, which found a total U.S. population of 203 million and 9.6 million Hispanics. There are about 43 million Hispanics in the country today, according to the Census Bureau.

The United States "was not a melting pot" when the 200-millionth American arrived, Mr. Frey said. "But we're now becoming a new melting pot."

Carl Haub, a senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), agreed.

The American melting pot disappeared after the 1920s and did not return until well after the government "liberalized its immigration laws in 1965 and stopped discriminating against those from areas other than Europe."

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 did away with national-origin quotas, in which 70 percent of all immigrant slots were given to natives of just three countries -- the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an organization that opposes unbridled immigration.

In fact, sharp increases in immigration started in the mid-1980s and have continued since.

"The 1990s had the biggest increases in numbers of immigrants" of any of the previous six decades, Mr. Frey said.