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The Census Bureau said this week that the U.S. population “is projected to reach a high of nearly 370 million in 2080 before edging downward to 366 million in 2100.” The post-2080 decline in population is really only a quarter of the story: The only reason the bureau isn’t projecting a more spectacular collapse in population is because, over that time period, “immigration is projected to become the largest contributor to population growth.” Put another way: Americans are projected to have far, far fewer babies over the next 80 years, and immigration is the only way that we don’t suffer an absolutely catastrophic 30% decline in U.S. population. We’re not having babies, so we need a mass infusion of immigrants to keep our heads above water.
It’s pretty simple stuff. The inescapable conclusion—it’s a scientific conclusion at this point—is that if we don’t start having a lot more kids then absolutely everything changes: Either we experience an unthinkable decline in our population, or we maintain our current population metric by importing what is effectively an entire foreign population into the country. Absent a huge spike in fertility, those are the two outcomes. You don’t have any options other than these three.
We can deal with what are the two likeliest objections to this formulation right now:
“The effect of a major population decline wouldn’t be that bad!” But of course it would. Modern, highly developed economies are dependent upon high populations; they can sustain themselves in no other way. If you have a stark decline in population you have a stark decline in everything else you’ve come to associate with the modern world: High standards of living, a strong economy, consistent services, working utilities, functioning government. Here’s something: Think about the past two or three years during which we’ve been dealing with this weird, inexplicable “labor crisis,” where huge portions of the labor pool seem to have just disappeared overnight. That has been, in the main, materially unpleasant and frustrating and inconvenient and sometimes worse. The things on which we’ve come to rely over the course of our relatively privileged lives—quick service, readily available goods, reliably consistent economic exchange, stores with consistent and accessible hours, consistently well-stocked shelves—all became uncertain and thrown into a sort of low-grade chaos for like a couple of years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the “Great Resignation” peaked at around a quit rate of 3.0%. Three percent. Now imagine if 30% of your population just up-and-quits over a relatively short span of years. What do you think that would look like? And, I mean, not to go on and on about it, but the 30% of quitters, it’s not the retirees. Those folks go on living; it’s just that younger people aren’t born. In a fertility crisis you don’t lose 30% of your Golden Girls, you lose 30% of your Alex Keatons, the guys actually doing the work to prop up everything else. Picture the last few years on catastrophic steroids: That’s a population collapse in a nutshell. And 2100 would be only the beginning.
“It wouldn’t be so bad to have immigrants make up the population gap!” I suppose you could be right, theoretically. There’s a lot of politically charged sentiment around the topic of immigration so it can be hard to sift through the weeds on this one and really get at the heart of the matter. Let’s put it this way: Imagine if you reduced your household size by 30% and replaced that person or those people with individuals from an entirely different household—not babies but grown men and women and/or older children. Do you think your life would change at all, in any measurable way? Of course it would. Your new housemates would have been reared in and shaped by entirely different elements and environments than your own house. They would have different desires, expectations, moods, habits, values, triggers, disgusts; they would order their lives differently from yours, prioritize different things, insist on concessions and compromises entirely different from your own. You have two options in that scenario: You either radically change your household to meet the demands and inclinations of your new boarder, or you resist, you throw up your defenses, you dig in your heels—and you endure years of protracted, bitter and calamitous conflict, both of you constantly asserting your own prerogatives and your own socio-cultural desires to the point where you’re always squabbling and life has become an unpleasant and at-times dangerous slog of constantly clashing principles.
You could argue that it might not be so bad, that the massive influx of immigrants over the next 80 years won’t clash with the culture and the life of the United States in so catastrophic a manner. Well, look: What do you want me to say? Where do you think these 140,000,000 people are going to come from? Western Europe? Are we going to import all of Italy, all of France and 2/3 of Poland? I think all of those people are pretty satisfied where they are. Immigration doesn’t come from high-income, high-standard countries; it comes from much harder, much more difficult places, crime-ridden South America and war-torn southern Africa, cartel-wracked Jalisco and corruption-wracked Haiti. To be sure, in the main we should be welcoming of people from these countries; we should open our doors to people looking to escape the squalid chaos and miserable violence that often defines life in these places. This is one of America’s very good points. But “welcoming a regular flow of immigrants from these countries” is not the same as “bringing in tens of millions of them every year over successive decades.” The former is right and appropriate; it allows for assimilation and for the shedding of those cultural trappings that the immigrants themselves want to escape. The latter is basically taking one place and moving it to another, making the new place more like the old place. This is what happens; it is very obvious. Just look at the neverending discourse around gentrification in the U.S.: What do you think happens to an historically black neighborhood’s culture and environment when white people swoop in and start flipping houses and opening cat sweater stores? At the end of 10 years is the neighborhood more black or more white? Does it look like the place built by black residents over 75 years or does it look like the place the white people came from 10 years ago? Why should the same thing not obtain at scale?
The only practical solution to these two rather bleak proposals is for people in the U.S. to start having more babies. That’s it! Just more babies. On average men and women in the U.S. don’t start having babies until their 30s and most families average fewer than two children. You can’t maintain that schedule and also maintain a growing population. You need more babies; you need to start earlier and go for longer. And I mean, look, it’s certainly easier to say it and harder to do it. I have four kids; believe me, at times it’s hard work. I get it. We are uniquely predisposed to shy away from hard work, never more so than when there are countless culture incentives urging us to do so.
Someone who doesn’t want to have kids, of course, isn’t going to have kids. It’s not the end of the world. But at scale we see what that looks like: Population decline, massive societal disruption, a wholesale reordering of a way of life. That’s just the natural end result. If you don’t mind those things, then you’re probably not going to sweat it too much one way or the other; if you do, the solution is to have more babies. And convince your neighbors to have more, too. And your coworkers. And the lady at the grocery store. And your running buddies. Basically everybody—just everybody’s gotta have more babies. Do that and we’ll be fine. No big deal!
So glad you're back, Zack! This was a great article; you pulled no punches. And yeah, it can be hard at times. But it's not hard all the time and when it is good, it is very very very good, just the best thing in the world! I had three, all grow now, and if I could get away with it I'd still sneak into their rooms at night just to watch their faces and smell their little heads and marvel at the miracle of their precious beings.