Last week, Lyman Stone wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about how the population bust is coming sooner than people realize:
There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.
Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home. The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people, and the skilled ones every aging country covets will be fought over. With most countries staring down the same cliff and with emigration from the United States rising, permanent high net migration is more of an aspiration than a forecast.
But the second act of wishful thinking has an even bigger effect. Many forecasters are assuming that current low fertility rates are temporary, that women are merely delaying having children rather than forgoing it entirely. But this isn’t true.
For this, Lyman was roundly attacked even by New York Times contributors, who imputed to him racist motives for his interest in the subject. Just increase immigration! That solves it.
It’s true that in the past racist governments have tried to regulate birth among those they deem unfit, and encourage birth among those they deem good citizens. But increasing immigration doesn’t solve the problem.
As Stone points out above, fertility rates are collapsing all over the world. There is no guarantee that immigrant populations will bolster the overall fertility rate in America. And the evidence we have on hand is that immigrants now come with fertility roughly comparable to native levels, or they quickly converge to the baseline.
In that case, immigration is like trying to turn a paper shredder into a printing press by feeding it more paper. The problem is that the social and financial incentives in the society are hostile to human reproduction. Besides, high immigration levels are associated with destabilizing periods of radicalism, both in our history and observed across the world. This anxiety will only be heightened during a period of native demographic collapse.