John D. Giorgis wrote: > What effect this will have can really only be speculated upon. > No substantive effect is my guess. -- Doug
Well, two points to be made on that. 1) The effect on the US in particular (and hence the world) depends in particular on our dedication to the assimilationist project. If we give up on assimilation - as so many of our academic elites have - then this will, over time, have a very large effect on the United States. But the defeat of bilingual education in California, for example, suggests that the people, with their usual wisdom, still believe fervently in assimilation. And in the end in the United States the people get what they want. 2) It's probably a greatly overstated concern. The linear projection of demographic trends is almost invariably massively wrong. A classic example is Mexico - some of the newest statistics suggest that the population of Mexico has begun to _decline_. This is quite extraordinary, to put it mildly. Similar effects will probably spread to much of the rest of the Third World. Even more strikingly, AIDS is far more serious in Third World countries than it is in the US, Europe, and Japan. We are already seeing catastrophic infection rates in Africa. We _just don't have_ numbers for India and China, but most estimates are that it is significant and growing rapidly. The demographic effects of AIDS, over the course of the next half-century, probably cannot be overstated. Gautam
