In terms of both area and population, the United States of America is one of the largest countries in the world. In physical extent, it ranks third behind Russia and Canada, just barely surpassing China. Its population of about 310 million, places it third behind China and India, though by a considerable margin, as each of those Asian countries now tops one billion inhabitants. A new American is born approximately every eight seconds.
Cultural Demography
The 1980s and especially the 1990s saw a resurgence of foreign immigration into the United States. New residents arriving from other lands have once again - as they did from the colonial era until just before World War I - become a very significant factor in the country's population growth, supplementing the natural increase from births.
The numerically largest group, though their share of the total continues to decline, are of European descent. Some Europeans began arriving in the Americas from the earliest days of imperial exploration and colonial settlement; great waves of immigrants traveled across the Atlantic in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The African-American population shares the ancestry of slaves brought to the Americas from Africa under the plantation system that characterized colonial rule and persisted in the southern United States until the Civil War.
The large and fast-growing states of California, Texas and Florida are expected to bear the brunt of population gains in the next 25 years. According to United States Census Bureau projections, during this period these three states will accommodate nearly half the rise in the national population, accruing some 29.3 million additional inhabitants, out of an anticipated 60 million increase for the United States as a whole.
The Hispanic group has the fastest growth rate and, in five years, is projected to be the country's largest minority group. Other groups whose numbers are rising comparatively rapidly include Asians and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and foreign-born blacks. Among both Latinos - long grouped as Hispanic by the Census Bureau - and those of Asian heritage, the population includes descendants of settlers who arrived well before the 20th century, as well as recent immigrants.
Adding to the varied American social and cultural scene are indigenous Native Americans, the Inuit and Aleut people - designated as Native Alaskans - and Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians are of the Polynesian ethnolinguistic grouping, while the largest ethnic group on the islands is of Japanese origin. The Native American population is highly diverse. The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs officially recognizes 562 tribes, including 223 village groups in Al aska; additionally, nearly 150 applications for federal recognition as Native American tribes are currently pending. Various other indigenous groups that are more or less distinct exist outside the scheme of Bureau of Indian Affairs recognition.
The United States is already a highly diverse country, and the degree of diversity is accelerating. At the turn of the 21st century, more than one of every 10 residents was foreign-born. A little more than half the foreign-born population, at 51.0 percent, is from Latin America or the Caribbean, with people born in Mexico accounting for about half of this group. People from Asia represent 25.5 percent of foreign-born residents, and those from Europe 15.3 percent. This marks a slight increase of Latino immigrants since 1990, while those from Asia and Europe have declined marginally.
Among the foreign-born population, 39.5 percent entered the United States in the 1990s, 28.3 percent arrived in the 1980s, and 16.2 percent in the 1970s, with roughly the same number arriving prior to 1970. Of those who moved to the United States prior to 1970, 80 percent had become United States citizens by 2000, compared to 61.9 percent of those who immigrated in the 1970s and 38.9 percent of those who changed homelands in the 1980s. Although this trend indicated the longer a person stays in the United States, the more likely he or she was to apply for citizenship, the numbers fall sharply for those who moved during the 1990s: Only 8.9 percent of those who arrived in the past decade have applied for citizenship. Still, more than 30 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants are naturalized citizens.
Religion
Reflecting the diverse population, religions practiced in the United States encompass the world's major typologies. More than 80 percent of the people are at least nominal Christians, two-thirds of them professing one of the various Protestant denominations and the other third Roman Catholicism. In fact, the proportion of believers who are actively observant and regularly attend places of worship tends to be higher in the United States than in most other industrialized countries. Judaism is the most prevalent non-Christian faith, although Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are rapidly gaining a more significant presence as the United States becomes an inexorably more multicultural society.
Languages
The United States does not have an official language. English is the predominant language spoken in the country. Spanish has the highest prevalence of use except for English, and many other languages are found in ethnic enclaves. Some randomly chosen examples: A French Creole variant called Cajun is heard in the state of Louisiana, and northern New England has a significant contingent of residents with French Canadian heritage. San Francisco, New York and other cities have large Chinese-speaking populations. The area surrounding the nation's capital of Washington has become home to more than 60,000 African immigrants, including tens of thousands of Amharic-speaking Ethiopians and Eritreans. In the western interior of the United States, sheepherders speaking Basque established an extensive network, a now-diminished yet still extant presence.
In general, many cities and some rural areas harbor a wide range of European, Asian and occasionally African communities who maintain their cultural and linguistic identities. Indigenous peoples, including Hawaiians, Alaskan Inuit and others are seeking to preserve - and in some cases, revive - everyday use of their original tongues.
Human Development
In terms of health and welfare, the expected life expectancy is 79 years, according to recent estimates. The infant mortality rate is 6.37 deaths per 1,000 live births. The literacy rate for both males and females aged 15 and over is 99 percent.
One notable measure used to determine a country's quality of life is the Human Development Index (HDI), which has been compiled annually since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI is a composite of several indicators, which measure a country's achievements in three main arenas of human development: longevity, knowledge and education, as well as economic standard of living. In a recent ranking of 169 countries, the HDI placed the United States in the very high human development category, in 4th place.
Note: Although the concept of human development is complicated and cannot be properly captured by values and indices, the HDI, which is calculated and updated annually, offers a wide-ranging assessment of human development in certain countries, not based solely upon traditional economic and financial indicators.
Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief at CountryWatch; see Bibliography for list of research sources.