Our sudden concern over American fertility
This is an offshoot of our nation's ongoing racial makeover
All of a sudden we’re hearing about needing to have a lot more babies here in America, lest we follow others down the rabbit hole of DEPOPULATION!
What others, you say?
Try this list: Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Greece, and China — for now. Soon up? Russia, Germany, South Korea, and Spain are projected to start declining by decade’s end.
But isn’t America still growing?
Yes, yes we are.
We clocked in at 332m in the 2020 census, and we’re at almost 337m now.
So, where do we truly locate this fear?
Population is rising and we attract immigrants at speed and volume. And, if it wasn’t for our broken immigration system (being too hard to get in) resulting in so many undocumented, maybe we wouldn’t be facing a labor shortage estimated presently at 1.7m workers.
Is our African American population growing?
Ah, almost by a third in absolute terms since century’s turn.
That’s natural growth (more births than deaths), with foreign-born Blacks doubling over the same timeframe.
So, concerns over Black population growth … wouldn’t make any sense.
How about Asian Americans?
Again, a rough doubling of Asian Americans since 2000. And, guess what? More than half of them are foreign-born. So, no problem hitting any Asian quotas, if they existed.
Now, on to Latinos: they account for over 70% of our nation’s population growth this century and have now reached 20% of our population, making them the biggest single minority group, as we choose to count these things. So, they’re coming in droves and are the most fertile subpopulation we have.
Which leaves us with Whites, which, for the first time in American census history, experienced an absolute decline in numbers from 2010 to 2020. It was almost a 10 percent drop in just a decade. Stunning.
The reasons are varied:
An aging white population leads to more deaths than births (natural decrease). The median age of Whites in America is 58, with non-Whites three decades (!) younger at 27. You want to know why Trump skews old in voter appeal while Harris has re-activated the young? Whoop, there it is!
We are clearly in a lull on fertility in the U.S., with it decreasing across all races in response to the pandemic, which is driving a lot of this fear. That scary and scarring experience may well permanently depress fertility among Millennials and Zs and even Alphas like the Great Depression did a job on the Greatest Generation’s psyche. We just don’t know yet. It was clear that fertility has been on a steady decline as economic development and modernization sweep the planet within the larger dynamic known as globalization. That trend isn’t going anywhere but down. But, clearly, the pandemic turbo-charged that development among younger generations.
So, where are we on fertility in the U.S.?
Whites are not having babies anywhere near like they used to. The replacement fertility is 2.1 kids per woman and Whites in America went below that level well before the year 2000. Again, every race in America is losing fertility. Whites are just doing it (or not doing it) faster.
Non-Hispanic Whites stood at 1.9 briths per woman at the turn of the century, and are now down to 1.8.
Hispanics dropped from 3.2 to 2.4 (still above replacement).
Blacks dipped slightly from 2.2 to 2.1 this century (also above replacement).
Asians mirror Whites, going from 2.0 to 1.8.
For now, I’m not hearing Asian Americans speaking up about needing to have more babies. Nor am I hearing any Whites on that score (more non-White babies, that is).
Instead, I’m hearing a lot of White-on-White angst on this subject, and that’s entirely natural given the larger trends (Whites being the SOLE race in absolute decline, having the lowest fertility — along with Asians, and no longer representing the bulk of immigrants).
So, yeah, you get the picture.
We made a deal with ourselves amidst our modernity: To stay reasonably young, we let in a lot more immigrants. Smart. Especially as they tend to be concentrated in the working ages, thus giving our economy a sort of artificial — and permanent — demographic dividend (thicker in the working ages of 16-64 and thinner above and below in age).
That choice turbo-charged the diversification of our population …
… in a process that we seemed to suddenly wake up to in 2008 when we elected our first non-White president, triggering an extreme right-wing response now mainstreamed as White Christian Nationalism.
I get this all the time in my talks: Why do you bring up the race thing every time when you’re talking about our relationship with globalization?
It’s because our internal loathing on this subject (Where is the White America I grew up in?) is mirrored in our external loathing on this subject (Why are all the immigrants from “bad” [non-White] countries?).
You put those two fears together and you have an America in retreat from the world and its creation, known as globalization.
Many Whites in America see a future that is increasingly non-them. Many Americans look out across globalization and see a future that is similarly non-them (non-White, non-American, non-European, non-Western, non-Christian).
And when you can no longer see yourself in the future, do you know what you do?
You retreat into the past.
And, yeah, when I put it altogether like that, the book does seem like a “graphic novel for futurists.”
Spot on as always!