Opinion: U.S. Census Bureau is cutting population immigration

Editor’s note: Justin Gest (@_Justin Gest) is a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where he public policy program.he is the author of six books on the politics of immigration and demographic change, including his latest work.”majority minority” read more opinions On CNN.

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President Joe Biden committed a diplomatic blunder last week when he chided key US allies India and Japan as “xenophobic.” The president attributed America’s success to its historic admissions of immigrants and suggested that xenophobia in Delhi and Tokyo was constraining economic growth and population stability.

It may have been naive, but Biden wasn’t wrong. In particular, Japan’s population is expected to decline by one-third over the next half century.

But a few months ago, the U.S. Census Bureau released new projections showing that America’s own population will — for the first time in history — decline after 2080.

The only thing keeping this country from reaching this milestone next year is immigration.

The continued emergence of new entrants is expected to prevent the United States from aging as rapidly as Japan and other major economies. If anti-immigration opponents cut annual immigration in half, the United States would start shrinking in 2044.

The population of every country changes according to trends in birth rates and life expectancy. And like many high-income countries, the United States has seen a decline in birth rates over the past half century. This, combined with the increase in average life expectancy, is contributing to a serious aging of the population.

There are two reasons for the aging population. Bankruptcy is promised when too few working generations pay into pension and health care funds that are obligated to support more retirement-age seniors. A declining population will also reduce economic power and market size, one of America’s greatest geopolitical assets.

The main solution to low demographic birth rates is immigration. By achieving disproportionate working ages and high birth rates, immigrants inject youth, labor, and innovation into society, and when their numbers are large enough, they offset aging trends. As Biden touted, this has been central not only to America’s economic growth over the past few decades, but also to its demographic stability. Almost all of the population growth in the United States is due to the arrival of immigrants, rather than births exceeding deaths.

What’s particularly bleak about the Census Bureau’s new projections is that the U.S. government is expected to shrink immigration even if it maintains current levels of immigration. And for those of you who haven’t downloaded Truth Social, the current level is unacceptable to today’s Republican Party.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, former President Donald Trump said he would put new arrivals in concentration camps and deport millions of immigrants who Census projections assume will remain in the United States. He said he wanted to. Both will only accelerate our country’s population decline.

Census reports show that by 2029, the number of Americans 64 and older will exceed the number of Americans under 18. At that point, only 60% of the American population will be between the ages of 18 and 64, down from nearly 70% in 2029. 2010. In the United States, deaths are predicted to exceed births for the first time in history by 2038. At that point, the United States will have 13,000 more deaths than births, but the shortfall will increase to 1.2 million additional deaths per year by 2100, which is twice the current annual shortfall in Japan. It will be doubled.

The U.S. population is projected to reach a high of approximately 370 million people in 2080 before entering a historic decline. But if immigration is cut by about half, Census Bureau demographers estimate this milestone will be reached in 2044. The decline will begin next year if the border is completely closed, as many Republican officials argue.

It is not surprising that this effect is immediate. If the United States’ population growth were due to the arrival of immigrants, as it is now, the United States would stop growing when it could no longer accept new arrivals.

Of course, the Republican Party’s self-defeating anxiety about immigration was informed in part by an earlier Census report, the March 2015 announcement that predicted a “majority-minority” milestone in 2044. There is. Contrary to new research, “population decline” in America is predicted. It made headlines everywhere that the proportion of the white population was less than 50% of the population. The numbers are troubling for a variety of reasons, but they also encouraged liberals about their electoral prospects and sparked a fierce backlash against immigration among conservatives.

Once a bureaucratic issue for conservatives, with the Reagan administration supporting amnesty for all illegal aliens, immigration has now become a central pillar of the post-2015 Republican Party. Immigration is a top issue for conservatives heading into the 2024 general election, and a stumbling block to Biden’s prospects among independents.

But if the 2015 Census projections fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, this report could have the opposite effect.

That’s because my latest research suggests that information about the reality of population aging is persuading people, especially moderates and centrists, to open up about immigration.

My co-authors and I surveyed more than 20,000 adults in 19 European countries. Some of these respondents, according to demographers, were informed about real demographic trends, similar to those revealed in recent U.S. Census reports, and their countries’ birth rates were “We are well below the levels needed to sustain indigenous populations.”

Some of the same respondents said that, despite the large number of immigrants already entering their country over the years, in order to maintain current population levels the government must “remove immigration from non-European countries with high birth rates. “We need to accept it on a large scale,” he said. As well as in Muslim-majority African countries. ”

Notably, despite bringing up minority outgroups that may unsettle some voters, respondents from this subset were more likely to receive immigration numbers than respondents who had no news about population decline. were more likely to support an increase in

In Western European countries, where rising birth rates among minorities are cushioning the effects of population aging, respondents have been less concerned about far-right fears about “alternative theories” since immigration has been portrayed as important to national survival. He even resisted statements that incited him. This was especially true for respondents with a centrist political ideology, those over 35 years of age, and those with average educational background.

Rather than seeing immigration as a threat to “replace” states, these respondents were more likely to see them as a means to “replenish” states.

The results of the experiment and the Census Bureau report come as political leaders in the United States and Europe scramble to strengthen their borders. But just as people want a well-managed admissions system, there is also a conflicting desire to maintain the country’s population.

While the world is polarized over the arrival of foreign nationals, population aging remains an unresolved and deepening reality, and reason enough to invest in an orderly immigration system that will future-proof the nation. .