Every day in the decade of the 1990's Florida grew by 834 people.
We reached 16 million people by the April 2000 U.S. Census count.
Florida doubled its population in twenty-five years.
We grew by 23.5% in the 1990's (2.35% annually) which gives a
doubling time of thirty years.
From 2003-2004 we grew at a 4.7% rate, a projected doubling in
fifteen years.
That is a faster rate of growth than Haiti at 1.73%, India at
1.8% and Mexico at 1.95%
Florida added three million people in the 1990's: 14.7% from
natural increase and 85.3% from migration. 18.27% of the births
in Florida during 2000 were to women of foreign birth.
The Center for Immigration
Studies estimates that one-half to two-thirds of Florida's
growth in the 1990's was due to foreign immigrants and their offspring.
For detailed reports visit http://www.cis.org
and http://www.fairus.org).
In 2005 Florida has grown by 1,000 people net each day..
Yet Florida has not kept up with the additional infrastructure
required for the state's population growth. We will need twice
as much of everything and we will lose twice as much of our resources
in just fifteen to thirty years. Water shortages, more expensive
energy, and affordable housing losses are already occurring and
will worsen with unrestricted growth.
(See http://www.sprawlwatch.org/communications.html)
Carrying capacity/sustainability is impossible at present numbers.
Biologists and land use planners say Florida's sustainable population
size needs to be around six or seven million at the current life
styles we are living. Around 150 million is sustainable for the
U.S. which is already at 297 million.
(See "Too
Many People" by Lindsey Grant and "Florida's Ecological Footprint"
by Morris Wackernagel)
There are too many people in Florida and in the U.S. And still we do not have a U.S. population policy despite several national commissions indicating a need to limit our numbers (http://www.numbersusa.com).
"Truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it
and ignorance may deride it,
but in the end, there it is."
--Winston Churchill