Argentines (argentinos in Spanish), also called Argentinians, are the citizens of Argentina, or their descendants abroad. Argentina is a multiethnic society, which means that it is home to people of many different ethnic backgrounds. As a result, Argentines do not consider their nationality as an ethnicity but as a citizenship with various ethnicities. Aside from the Indigenous and Mestizo population, nearly all Argentines or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries. In fact, Argentina was the second country in the world that received the most immigrants, with 6.6 million, second only to the US with 27 million, and ahead of countries such as Canada, Brazil, and Australia. According to the , Argentina had a population of 40,091,359 inhabitants, of which 1,805,957 or 4.6%, were born abroad. The population growth rate in 2008 was estimated to be 0.917% annually, with a birth rate of 16.32 live births per 1,000 inhabitants and a mortality rate of 7.54 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants. Argentina’s population has long had one of Latin America’s lowest growth rates (recently, about one percent a year) and it also enjoys a comparatively low infant mortality rate. Strikingly, though, its fertility rate is still nearly twice as high (2.3 children per woman) as that in Spain or Italy, despite comparable religiosity figures. The median age is approximately 30 years and life expectancy at birth is 75 years.