Birth Rates and Immigration

[Bootstrap]

... the topic of this post, which is that the number of illegal-alien arrivals (according to government statistics) now exceeds the number of births (which includes births to illegal aliens and people of all kinds of races and nationalities). If you want to make a thread to discuss Nazis, go create one. If you want to create a thread to discuss other authoritarian governments, go create one.

Let me do the opposite. In this thread, let's have a discussion of birth rates and immigration, both legal and illegal, without raising the things you say you don't want to discuss.

[Bootstrap]

Prosperous countries have lower birth rates - generally, low enough that the population would decline if there were no immigrants.

You can see this in data using this link:

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

I set up a comparison of fertility and income here:

[Bootstrap]

Social Security and other programs that support seniors depend on active workers. If the American population declines, funding retirees is very difficult. And of course, the work participation rate is also going down. So we have fewer taxpayers to support retirees:

[mike]

China is an interesting study. Its immigration rate is negative, and its birth rate is low. Its population is aging, its workforce (and theoretically the pool of people available for its military) will shrink in the next decade, and its gender imbalance is becoming a real problem. It seems that nobody wants to immigrate into China, legally or illegally, and the people who are there don't want to have children despite increasing governmental pressure.

What do you guys think will happen in China the next few decades given these societal changes and pressures?

[RZehr]

I had posted this in the Social Security thread:

Not arguing here really, but consider-
We know that Social Security has no cash in a bank somewhere that funds beneficiaries. And that it currently relies on the payments of today’s workers to pay for today’s beneficiaries.
The birth rate of the average American woman in 2023 was 1.784 births per woman. So that seems to leave less than two workers (children, next generation) to fund their parents retirement.

The birth rate of the average Mennonite or Amish woman is what? 4? 5? Either way I’m sure it is more than 1.784. Some groups might be 10+.

It comes down to financial discipline. The demographics are favorable for the churches, so that isn’t the problem.

[ken_sylvania]

We should establish a policy encouraging young adults from low income countries to come to the USA. This would have quite a variety of benefits such as..

* They can do the hard, dangerous, dirty, backbreaking, monotonous jobs for wages just a fraction of what we would insist on to do those jobs ourselves. This would assist us in our quest to teach our children that manual labor is degrading and that they should aspire to "professional" type jobs befitting their class in life. It would also enable us to continue to afford to live in luxury as we live in houses built with low-wage labor, eat out-of-season fruits and vegetables grown using low-wage labor and transported to our local grocery store using low-wage labor, and as we fill our closets, garages, and storage units with all kinds of gadgets built by impoverished people.

* Instead of caring for their own elderly parents at home, they can be caretakers in nursing homes, hospitals, and assisted living facilities so that we can pretend to have done our duty by our own parents by putting them in a nursing home while we travel to Africa as "missionaries."

* We can tax their wages to help pay for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, once again reducing the amount of support they are able to send home to their own impoverished families.

What's not to like about it?

[Josh]

Prosperous countries have lower birth rates - generally, low enough that the population would decline if there were no immigrants.

Generally speaking, it has been promoted that lower birth rates are a "good thing", with vast government and societal support, including making birth control legal, encouraging urbanisation, and promoting lower birth rates and smaller families as saving on resources and prioritising higher education.

If these things are actually good things (I am not saying that they are), then it seems odd to then try to "import" people from other places to replace the missing children that weren't had. And it's even odder to implement government policies, like skyrocketing housing costs and requiring credentials for careers that need a bachelor's or master's degree, that make it difficult for native families to form, find a place to live, and have children.

Then, when the children are missing, say "we need more immigrants" and import immigrants who are not well educated, lack resources, and end up needing the same resources that native families are having trouble getting either. The only group that benefits are the wealthy who have access to lots of cheap labour. I don't see any reason to indulge this.

[Bootstrap]

What percent of Americans were born elsewhere? How has that changed over time?

Look at the blue line - we now are getting close to the levels of immigration we had from 1860 to 1910:



This includes both legal and illegal immigration. 77% of immigrants are here legally:

[Bootstrap]

In another thread, Josh claimed "the number of illegal alien arrivals now exceeds the number of births to anyone in America". Let's see if that's true. How many children were born in the United States for the last 10 years or so? How many immigrants moved to the United States?

According to the CDC, there were about 3,664,292 births in 2021. Other years are in this ballpark (between 3.93 million and 3.61 million in recent years).

According to Pew, there are "more than a million" new immigrants every year, counting legal and illegal.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads ... mmigrants/

So we have less than 1/3 as many new immigrants as native born Americans in a given year. More than 1/4, but a lot closer to 1/4. If we take one million even, the ratio is 0.27.

[Josh]

In another thread, Josh claimed "the number of illegal alien arrivals now exceeds the number of births to anyone in America". Let's see if that's true. How many children were born in the United States for the last 10 years or so? How many immigrants moved to the United States?

According to the CDC, there were about 3,664,292 births in 2021. Other years are in this ballpark (between 3.93 million and 3.61 million in recent years).

According to Pew, there are "more than a million" new immigrants every year, counting legal and illegal.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads ... mmigrants/

So we have less than 1/3 as many new immigrants as native born Americans in a given year. More than 1/4, but closer to 1/4.

The data I posted was per month, and specifically highlighted that it eclipsed it in the last month. Your data is aggregated annually. The trend line is very obvious. I'll repost it for you.

The source of the data is https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sout ... encounters (I assume we can trust government CBP figures) and CDC birth data.



We see that illegal alien encounters are steadily rising, whilst births are not. I never claimed that they eclipsed it for the entire year - I posted the exact picture above, and documented that they eclipsed them in the last month.

Please feel free to post your own statistics for births in the last month and alien arrivals in the last month. (I also was not including numbers of legal migration, which would have pushed this number up even higher.)