Why the white America Trump dreams of is just a fantasy | US economy

Here’s one reason why Donald Trump always seems to be in a bad mood: It’s probably America’s dreaming about is out of reach.

No matter how many immigrants he manages to deport or prevent from entering the country, the white paradise Maga promises to his base, free of Somalis, Mexican “rapists,” and generally people from “shithole countries” (countries closer in hue to his native America), is not something he can offer.

But it can do a lot of damage. By doing everything he can to make the United States unbearable both to foreigners and more generally. people of ethnic origin mismatched his picture American family, Trump Is Not Making America Great Again. It makes America smaller, older, weaker and easier to push.

Even completely resetting immigration won’t be enough to revitalize the America Trump longs for. No matter what he does to get rid of immigrants, he won’t be able to keep the non-Hispanic white footprint from shrinking.

Trump isn’t the first politician to try this Preserving beliefs about America’s racial origins without “foreign” contamination. The national origin immigration quotas in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were quite successful in achieving this. In 1960, 75% of immigrants to the United States came from Europe.

But the set was broken. Hart-Celler Act of 1965 Family ties replaced national origin. These days, only 10% of immigrants come from Europe. more than half comes from Latin America. When Trump was four years old, nine out of 10 Americans were white (the census did not ask for Hispanic ethnicity). By 2024, the share of non-Hispanic whites had fallen to 57.5%.

Nothing Trump does to stop immigration will change this trend. Because the non-Hispanic white population will continue to decline no matter what Census Bureau projects It predicts the loss of 3.6 million people in the next five years, almost 11 million in the next decade, and more than 14 million in the next decade.

This means that if Trump and his ethno-nationalist lieutenant Stephen Miller achieve their goal of reducing future immigration to zero, the US population will decline quite sharply. It will shrink by 6 percent by mid-century, 10 percent by 2060, and a third by 2100. While the president may not fully realize this — his understanding of economics has proven poor — the demographic contraction will come at a serious cost.

The population will not only decrease. It will age because the working age population will decrease even faster. Today, people over the age of 65 make up approximately one fifth of the population. In a zero migration scenario, their share will increase to a quarter by the middle of the century and to more than a third by the end of the century, supported by a shrinking workforce.

Data is keeping people in the White House busy. But his prescriptions are as unrealistic as his other dreams: to increase fertility in America, which has fallen over the past two decades and now stands at 1.6 children per woman of reproductive age, well below the roughly 2.1 replacement rate needed to stabilize the population.

Part of the problem is that fertility decline is a global phenomenon that scientists are focusing on. I don’t fully understand. This is happening not only in rich and middle-income countries, but also in the world’s poorest countries, where fertility is relatively high. In developed countries, pronatalist policies, including child benefits, expanded provision of child care, and other family supports, have had a major impact. limited effect The tendency of families to have children.

The other problem is that the solutions proposed by the Trump administration border of absurdity. These include a “National Medal of Motherhood” specifically for fertile mothers, fertility tracking classes, and $1,000 to be deposited into “Trump accounts” for babies born during his presidency. These come amid a range of policies that will make childbearing harder, such as cutting federal support. child health and nutrition, thanks to the president’s tax cut bill.

Trump’s problem, in a nutshell, is that his simplistic policy approach to alleviating America’s demographic problem is to rely on the very people for whom he has expressed his boundless disgust: non-white immigrants.

In the Census Bureau’s high immigration scenario, where net migration averages around 1.5 million annually, the U.S. population would increase 13% by 2050 and 28% by the end of the century. The 65-plus share will not reach one-quarter until 2070.

One challenge to this scenario is that there may not be enough immigrants to continue supporting the American population, especially as fertility rates are also falling in Latin America and Asia. Net migration to the US averaged 1.8 million per year between 2020 and 2024 due to an increase following the Covid pandemic. But in the decade before that it only reached 900,000 a year.

The bigger conundrum for the president is something else. The pure, non-Hispanic white footprint will shrink in every scenario. But if immigration is high, it will fall faster: 58 percent of the population this year, falling below 47 percent in 2050. The Hispanic share will increase from just under 20 percent to almost 26 percent.

The challenge must be torturing the man: If Trump wants to keep America great, he should let it get browner.