Reply #57: The 'maintenance' fertility rate for the human population is 2.08

[JacquesMolay]

To maintain the global population at it's current rate, each woman could have 2 children (to replace herself and the father), and 2.08 on average - the .08 accounts for the percent of their spawn who will not reproduce. So having a kid or 2 is roughly sustainable.

However, the poster is right that overpopulation is a legitimate ecological issue. It makes people on the left uncomfortable to hear it applied to a situation like Mexican immigration. Mexico's fertility rate has been dropping, to 2.5 in 2005 (from 7 in 1960), and will probably drop to the maintenance rate soon. Over a period of a couple of decades, that should relieve some of the pressures that Mexican overpopulation is causing. And some of those problems are bad - there are 20 million people living in Mexico City, it is the most polluted city in the world outside of China, and they are depleting the groundwater so fast that the city is sinking a foot-and-a-half every year. Mexico is overpopulated, and the ramfications are causing people to take flight. Sorry if this seems like a tangent, but I wanted to support the first sentence of this paragraph.