Are You Ready for One Billion “Americans”?

In 2020, journalist Matthew Yglesias insisted we use increased immigration to grow the U.S. population to one billion. Our current 343-million number is insufficient to compete with a future China and India, his theory goes. Yet before we MACA — “Make America China Already!” — we should first ask a question:

“What’s So Bad About a Stable Population?”

Doing just that Tuesday is columnist Froma Harrop. Writing at Creators, she begins:

Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon warned Congress against the rapid growth of the American population: “When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth.”

If the American headcount continued rising at the current rate, Nixon said, the nation’s “social supplies — the capacity to educate youth, to provide privacy and living space, to maintain the processes of open, democratic government — may be grievously strained.”

Since 1969, America’s population has boomed by about [140] million to today’s 343 million, a 69% jump. But today’s most prominent discussions on population trends rarely focus on the loss of “social supplies.” Quite the contrary. Even though the country is still adding people …, population alarmists are painting falling birthrates as an economic disaster in the making.

In fairness, Nixonian times were the days of the book The Population Bomb (1968) and the film Soylent Green (1973). Both played upon the fear, and myth, that irrevocably high birthrates would ensure interminable world population growth. In reality, professional demographers informed by at least the 1950s that industrialization would yield falling birthrates and, eventually, declining world population.

Yet this isn’t about the world’s population, but the United States’. We now number 343.6 million, up from 338.3 million in 2021. This itself is up from 311.2 million in 2010, 282.4 million in 2000, 223.1 million in 1980, 176.2 million in 1960, and 148.3 million in 1950. This again raises Harrop’s question. To analogize it, a responsible rooming-house owner wouldn’t continually take on boarders, blithely ignoring how many could reasonably be accommodated.

Likewise, shouldn’t we — and can we — ask what our country’s ideal maximum population would be?

Is it 400 million? A half-billion? Seven-hundred-fifty million?

Is it the one billion Yglesias insists upon? More?

A Third Rail of Political Commentary?

One reason this is a verboten topic is another good reason to make it a national conversation. As Harrop emphasizes, she’s not diminishing child-rearing; having kids is a joy. But our population isn’t increasing because Americans are reproducing robustly. In fact, our fertility rate (~1.60) has long been below replacement level (2.1 children per woman).

Rather, the sole population-growth driver for many years now has been (im)migration.

(Note: Even though the United States’ births still outpace her deaths, this would likely not be the case without long-standing immigration.)

The upshot: Controlling our population is in our hands. Limiting it is as easy — and as hard — as changing immigration policy.

Economic Implications

“Wait, though,” some will say. “Aren’t declining populations a problem?” Ex-Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, who couldn’t flood Europe with “diversity” agents fast enough, certainly thought so. She warned in 2019 that nations experiencing population decline need “skilled…workers” (after having just admitted waves of unskilled Third Worlders).

But not so fast. In the U.S., artificial intelligence and robotics are already replacing American workers. And they’re poised to eliminate a high percentage of jobs in the near future. (Germany will be no different.) Moreover, the United States’ official unemployment rate is basically phony. Consider 2022, when the unemployment figure was supposedly 3.7 percent. The “true rate,” some say, may be as high as 23.6 percent.

In other words, we have plenty of potential workers, more than our developing high-tech world may require. (What is true is that while there are no “jobs Americans won’t do,” there are wages Americans won’t work for. Ending immigration and thus limiting worker supply would increase those wages.)

Then, however, there’s something else we have plenty of. As Harrop concludes:

I don’t recall thinking, as my car crawled in traffic through Rocky Mountain National Park, “Gosh, I wish there were more people on this road.”

Was America a sad place in 1958, when it had half as many inhabitants as now? Historians refer to its decade as the “Fabulous Fifties.” Think about it.

For sure, do we really need more strain on resources (e.g., water) and more crowded schools, hospitals, and highways? Why, we’ve added to the United States in just the past three years a foreign population (at least 6.5 million) greater than that of each of a majority of our states (38). Is this wise?

Demographics Is Destiny?

Then there’s the most important factor of all: cultural effect. As I pointed out in 2023, we often behave as if (im)migrants are robots. That is, entities that perform merely an economic function. But they are human beings, who come with cultures, religions, ideologies, philosophies, and passions. What they believe really matters, too. It can change our nation for good — or for ill.

Now, current immigration policy ensures that 85-90 percent of our immigrants will come from the Third World and Asia. This long-standing reality has reduced our non-Hispanic-white (i.e., Western descent) population from 85-plus percent in 1965 to 57-58 percent today. And if Yglesias has his way with his one-billion U.S. population ambition, an AI projection I ran shows the Western-descent share dropping to 19 percent. So, exit questions:

Will the already-balkanized United States still be Western in character when populated mainly by non-Western peoples? Would all the new Americans really be “American”?

And even if the future did need massive numbers of human workers, would a non-Western U.S. be competitive?

Whatever the answers, we don’t want to end up saying, “Maybe we should’ve discussed this 80 years ago.” Because, in truth, we should’ve already discussed this 50 years ago.