"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
> being out for the group instead of just yourself
This is so far removed from present day US. A large portion of the country enthusiastically/fanatically/religiously supports someone who thinks exclusively of himself.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
90 comments
[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 76.0 ms ] thread[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
This is so far removed from present day US. A large portion of the country enthusiastically/fanatically/religiously supports someone who thinks exclusively of himself.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
It’s not that simple.
This is why I love the internet because this sentence alone holds so much treasure.
Seriously, the issue is more our economic system. It is certainly not humanity in danger of dying out with 8 billion people, on the contrary...
Some argue the wrong people procreate, but meh...
Personally I just think less people want children because they find other things to do.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.