350 - Demography Determines: Doing Without Immigrants Dooms Us
Along with nearly all of the developed world, the U.S. is not birthing babies. In 2024, only 3.6 million births were recorded within these United States. That is just 1 percent more than the number born in 2023, the lowest year on record. More concerning is that the combined fertility rate of all American women in 2024 was 1.6 per mother over her lifetime. In order to keep our total population numbers steady, year in and year out from births, we (and every other nation) require a steady replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman over a lifetime.
Immigration makes up the native birthing shortfall, and keeps the U.S. growing, producing, enlarging its per capita GDPs, swelling the tax base, revitalizing our global leadership in innovation, advancing scientifically, making technological breakthroughs, and everything else that has made the U.S. envied and great. The Trump administration obviously is ignorant in this critical area as in almost all others. Its policies may even drive birth rates lower this year and next. Deportations cannot help.
The U.S. is not alone in experiencing low birth rates. Japan, South Korea, China, Brazil, nearly all of Europe, Russia, and many other parts of the world face the crisis of slumping birth numbers and need immigrants to do much of the grunt work once performed by native citizens. Across the globe, with one large exception, the elderly are becoming more numerous and workers less so. The dependency ratio, as demographers put it, now means in much of the world a single youthful (15-34) worker supports four or more people who have retired. A few decades ago the ratios were much more favorable.
Women in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world began to reduce baby production around 2007. That drop followed a reduction in U. S. 'teen pregnancies from 62 per 1000 in 1991to 13 per 1000 in 2024. Availability of contraceptive devices and methods helped. But, since about 2007, women from 20-24 years old have produced half of the babies in 2024 that they birthed in 2007. And these births seem not be just delayed; they are foregone.
In the American case the answer, say demographers, is not going to be the pronatalist preachings of Trump or Vance, but removing the burden of crushing student debt, the provision of paid family leave and childcare subsidies, and making home ownership more affordable -- nationwide. A "baby bonus" may not help either.
There are two other imponderables: How much are Trumpian chaos and Trump-caused economic uncertainties going to inhibit births? We'll see next year at this time, but it is likely that birth numbers will plummet for those reasons and because immigrants are being harassed and pilloried.
Ironically, one part of the world is growing by leaps and bounds. It already supplies workers to our health care and other important industries. But Trump is pushing them away, to our ultimate detriment.
Sub-Saharan Africa is exploding. In some countries, women are still producing seven children over their individual lifetimes. After India and China, Africa will soon have the largest number of people in the world. Nigeria will shortly become the third largest country in the world, replacing the U.S. in population listings. Poor places with insufficient educational opportunities like Tanzania will swell in size to approximate Indonesia and Pakistan's totals. Lagos, in Nigeria, and Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, already rival Cairo, Mexico City, and Tokyo in size and congestion. They will grow exponentially, too, and mostly without services.
Most of all, sub-Saharan Africa has the youngest population on the planet. Its median age is now about 19 and will rise only very slowly over the next decade to 21 or 22. That means that retired Africans should be supported by the massive youth bulge as they age.
Africa cannot provide jobs, however, for its massive youth numbers. Young people must migrate to subsist. We could craft policies to take advantage of educated and well-motivated Africans (and from elsewhere, too). Instead, the U.S. will lose out and Africans will die needlessly trying to reach Europe by sea. We can do more to welcome African students, just as China does.
Already, Zimbabwe sends midwives to the United Kingdom and Malawi sends nurses there in number. Ethiopia has sent physicians to Chicago. Haiti supplies American health care needs. There are gig drivers in Philadelphia from Burkina Faso, and African restaurant proprietors in Boston. Immigrants from Africa, as from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, are building this country anew, having babies, and paying taxes. Despite what Trump believes, ours is a proud country of immigrants. Trying to deport the very people who can -- if motivated -- contribute to American productivity and also help to support impoverished Africa with remittances is an ostrich-like policy. Managing the flow sensibly is possible, but not if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is encouraged to kidnap students off the streets and evade the requirements of judicial due process.
Furthermore, re-shoring manufacturing, which Trump wants to achieve through misguided punitive tariffs, cannot succeed without immigrant labor. There are insufficient numbers of eligible native born workers of the right ages. We need eager outsiders who want to better themselves by struggling to achieve the American dream -- just like our own fathers, mothers, and grandfathers did. What would the U. S. have become if presidents before World War I had shut out Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants fleeing the poverty and pogroms in their birth countries? We can each turn to a neighbor and see the descendant of an immigrant. What if the U.S. had not welcomed Albert Einstein? What if Prince Estabrook, a Black man, had not fought against the British alongside white farmers and professionals at the Battle of Lexington, 250 years ago?
I recognize that in most developed countries, the birth rates are too low to sustain themselves and that they have, perforce, to rely on immigrants , with their higher birth rates, to keep those countries economically viable.
However, my concern with the high birth rates in the third world and the lack of opportunities for these burgeoning young generations is not being addressed seriously. I am referring to the urgency of an increasing emphasis on girls’ education. When you keep girls in school, they marry much later with diplomas under their belts; they have fewer children because they are educated enough to realize that they can devote more resources to those fewer children and the whole community, including the boys, benefits. The snowball picks up speed with more of the educated folks finding reasons and opportunities to stay and build up their own countries instead of providing cheap educated labor, like nurses, midwives and doctors to the developed world.