S. Stirling - Conquistador

John Rolfe always intended that the new land beyond the Gate should become an autonomous, self-reproducing community, rather than merely a source of wealth. Much of his initial profit, and at his encouragement a good deal of that made by his associates, went into promoting this growth.

The initial immigration got off to a slow start in 1946 (less than 200), but built up rapidly—by 1950, the Settler population was over 15,000. Then immigration remained at an average of around 1,000 to 1,500 a year for the next twenty years or so, but with wide fluctuations: big spikes in the early 1950s, the early 1960s; smaller ones in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s.

The “steady” part of the influx is Americans, usually recruited by chain migration (people sponsoring friends and relatives) or very careful approaches by Commission agents. There were a sprinkling of “involuntaries,” people who stumbled on the Gate secret or looked likely to do so—Gate Security usually abducted them to New Virginia.

Punctuating the steady inflow of Americans are bursts of quasi-refugees: in the 1940s Germans, Italians, Dutch from Indonesia, and Balts; French colons from North Africa and British settlers from Kenya in the 1950s and early 1960s; Rhodesians later; and Russians and Afrikaners in the 1990s.

By 2009, the population is 150,000, not counting 40,000 or so temporary Gastarbeiter on five-year contracts, who don’t have children. The Commonwealth’s TFR (total fertility rate) fluctuates between 3.7 and 4; about like the United States at the height of the baby boom in 1957, but stable, and it has been since the 1950s; the death rate is slightly below 8 per 1,000. Median age is around 26. There is a slight surplus of males among adults because of immigration effects—that happens anywhere with substantial immigration.

The shape of the population pyramid is more like that of Malaysia or other upper-income developing countries than that of the contemporary United States—or even that of the United States in the 1950s, since the baby boom there followed a period of very low fertility in the 1930s. The Commonwealth of New Virginia started out with a fairly high TFR and has maintained it unchanged, so the pyramid slopes out sharply—each age-cohort is about double the size of the one above.

With the continuing trickle of immigration, the annual population increase is about 3 percent.

Note that immigration tends to distort the population pyramid by increasing the percentage of the total in their prime reproductive years—there is a bulge in the 20 to 40 age group. Thus natural increase is higher than would be expected with the TFR and mortality rates, despite the fact that immigrants tend to have a lower TFR than the native born.

Doubling time for the Settler population is (as of 2009) about 23 years. This is lower than it was in earlier periods because immigration has remained static or declined slightly and is therefore smaller relative to the total population.

Population distribution is about:

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Tocharian is the name given to a group of Indo-European languages spoken in what is now Chinese Turkestan/Sinkiang from the Bronze Age through the early medieval period. The Tocharian speakers were the easternmost of the Indo-European peoples, and their tongue (rather oddly) shows a closer kinship to the western Indo-European languages (Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic) than it does to the Indo-Iranian group. Recent archaeological work in the Tarim, whose climate is uniquely suited to preserving bodies, has shown that the Tocharians were European in appearance as well—tall, narrow-faced people with light complexions and often blond or red hair; in fact, they looked rather like Central or Northern Europeans. In our history they were overrun and assimilated by Turkic-speaking peoples, the ancestors of the present Uighur population of Sinkiang.