The best way to boost births (that no one is talking about)

Immigrants are younger and have higher birth rates, but MAGA pronatalists want to scapegoat rather than celebrate them.

“They fill our prisons, our poor houses... Send them back to where they came from.”

"The country might soon need to station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes.”

"If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers... the lower race will prevail." ​

"We have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door, Americanize what we have, and save the resources of America." ​

If these sentiments sound familiar, you might be surprised to learn that they are all from the early 1920s or before, as politicians and pundits expressed alarm about the “invasion” of Irish, Italian, Polish, and German immigrants into the United States. Too many of the “wrong” people were coming to our shores, weakening our national identity and sullying our gene pool. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote in 1891, "The immigration of people from southern and eastern Europe threatens to degrade our citizenship and dilute our national character." ​

Many of these sentiments crystallized around the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed anti-immigration act, championed by Calvin Coolidge and shaped by prominent eugenicist and “race scientist,” Harry Laughlin. Laughlin, a fan of compulsory sterilization and a virulent anti-Semite whose work influenced the Nazi Reichstag, claimed that Jews were “feeble-minded” and “degenerate,” and that southern and eastern Europeans (Poles, Italians) were prone to dangerous insanity. He drew the latter conclusion by studying immigrants housed in asylums, a laughably bad sampling approach. Nevertheless, the legislation had serious consequences, setting immigration quotas on Italians, Poles, Asians, Jews, and other groups that subsequently made it harder for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany to enter the United States. (Interestingly, the 1924 act placed no restrictions on the immigration of Central or Latin Americans, since their contributions to agriculture were considered essential).

One of the reasons that politicians in the 1920s were so worried about the “wrong” Europeans entering the U.S. is that immigrants had higher birth rates than native-born Americans. Immigrant women had higher Total Fertility Rates (TFRs), often averaging 4–6 children, than native-born white women, whose fertility was hovering around 2–3 children by the 1930s. Indeed, 1920s and 1930s Census data suggest that immigrant fertility was a major contribution to population growth.

The drunken Irish and the drunken Germans are stealing your votes! Circa 1850

In my piece on the hypocrisy of MAGA pronatalist rhetoric earlier this week, I focused on the disconnect between Trump’s stated desire for a “baby boom” and his administration’s lack of support for policies that would actually enhance parents’ lives, like paid leave, childcare, and maternity healthcare access. But there’s an even bigger disconnect between MAGA pronatalism and the best lever for increasing births. As I wrote in the piece:

If you wanted to pick one single policy that would increase the birth rate and make the population more religious (a goal of many pronatalist conservatives), it’d be to encourage immigration. Immigrants tend to be more religious and have more babies than native-born Americans.

Not only is this true of present-day immigrants from places like Mexico, Central, and South America, but it was also true of Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles, Slavs, and other ethnic groups that came to the U.S. in the immigration boom of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. European immigrants tended to stick with their Old World religions (Catholicism in many cases) and have large families with closely connected extended family networks. Present-day immigrants are also more likely to be Catholic, have larger families, and have closer intergenerational ties. And, just as the immigrants of the last century helped to keep our population young and dynamic, setting us up for a booming 20^th century economy, the newest wave of immigrants can do the same.

So it’s very odd that in all the talk of baby booms and medals given to prolific mothers and convincing people to have bigger families that no one is talking about the actual people who are having bigger families and keeping us demographically afloat and ahead of countries whose falling birth rates portend greater peril. Not only is encouraging immigration nowhere in the baby boom conversation, but the Trump administration has aggressively dehumanized and terrorized immigrants, calling them animals and criminals and deploying ICE agents to handcuff and kidnap women and children off the streets.

Maybe you’re saying, “Sure, but these new immigrants are different! Those early 20^th century immigrants wanted to assimilate into U.S. culture, learn English, and join the melting pot! If these new immigrants have too many babies, they will dilute our U.S. culture and values – they are just too different.” Indeed, this is essentially what Tucker Carlson and other anti-immigrant figures have been saying on Fox News for the last few years.

The “teeming millions” of Europe and Asia: Too many for the melting pot! Ca. 1921

But take a closer look at the historical evidence and you’ll see that the early 20^th century wave of European immigrants was actually pretty slow to assimilate, and pundits at the time expressed concern that they would never do so. There were German-language public schools all over the Midwest in the early 1900s. There were also Polish-language schools and newspapers in places like Chicago, and Italian-language newspapers in New York, New Jersey, and other enclaves (as well as Little Italy neighborhoods in many cities). Here are a few quotes from that time:

"They are not of our race, not of our religion, not of our language.” — Rep. John Box (Texas), on the Italians

“The Jews come not to be Americans but to change America into Russia.” — Anti-immigration pamphlet, 1920s

“The Japanese can never be assimilated... They live in their own communities, and their loyalty is to the Mikado.” — Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge

“There are only two classes of people in this country: Americans and those who are against America. The German-Americans fall into the latter category.” — Midwestern mayor, 1918

“The Slavic immigrants are a menace to our institutions… they have no tradition of self-government.” — Immigration restrictionist testimony to Congress, 1920s

Of course, members of these ethnic groups gradually did assimilate, their birth rates fell, and they even produced MAGA faves like Pam Bondi (Italian-American); Mick Mulvaney and RFK Jr. (Irish-American); Stephen Miller and Howard Lutnick (Jewish); and Donald Trump himself (German-American Drumpf). We can especially thank the Irish, who received some of the most virulent anti-immigrant discrimination of any immigrant group (“No Irish allowed”) for bringing us delightful chatterboxes like Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell.

When pundits like Tucker Carlson state that immigrants are contaminating “our culture,” it’s worth asking – what culture? Is it the culture that belongs only to the Mayflower descendants, the mainline Protestants, the WASPiest Americans? Because I’ve got news for Tucker and his buddies: those people are the coastal elites that you hate! WASPs are the people that you call RINOs, the people who are swinging towards the left and making Connecticut and Massachusetts blue while groups like Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans get more conservative.

If Tucker and friends don’t just mean mainline non-evangelical Protestant WASPs when they say “American culture,” maybe they mean the melting pot culture that has actually been created by waves of immigrants over the centuries, not just the 20th century influx but the Dutch, Quakers, Swedes and others before them*: enterprising, optimistic, and hard-working, a culture of strivers. New immigrants share the same qualities and will enhance that culture, not weaken it. One popular telling of the 19th and 20th century American story is that our economy boomed because we hustled while the Old World stagnated. I’m reminded of the factory owner in Springfield, Ohio, who was quoted as saying he preferred to hire Haitian immigrants because they showed up to work on time and worked as hard as they could while the native-born Ohioans slacked off. I know whose contributions I’d rather have in our national gene pool.**

Of course, if you want new immigrants to assimilate, it helps to welcome rather than criminalize them. Public schools in the early 20^th century introduced U.S. history and civics classes to help “Americanize” new arrivals. Civics education: a boon for a cohesive culture! In contrast, the Trump administration has managed to terrify immigrants so much that many families are keeping their kids home from school and living in the shadows. Contrary to MAGA rhetoric, most immigrants are not degenerates (in fact, recent immigrants have lower crime rates than the general public), but hard-working people who are seeking a better life for their families. You can have strong borders and consistent laws, but you can also offer a reasonable path to citizenship and not throw people in foreign torture gulags or handcuff them in front of their children. You can celebrate programs like DACA, which help reverse the inverted age structure that is a consequence of low birth rates by bringing bright, motivated young people into our workforce.

The chute says “Direct from the slums of Europe daily”: Those Italians and Slavs are not sending their best; they’re sending anarchy, socialism, and the mafia!

Now, you might say that encouraging immigration is only a short-term strategy for improving U.S. birth rates, since not only is the birth rate falling globally, but immigrants typically start having smaller families within a few generations of settling into the U.S. You would be correct, and that very point would speak to the near-inevitable assimilation of new arrivals to this country. But even if we only benefit from a few generations of more births, a younger population will help keep our country vibrant and economically competitive for decades longer than the more homogeneous societies, like South Korea, that are already starting to die out.

In short: if you care about higher birth rates and think that more babies are good, you should be grateful to immigrants for being willing to have kids in this country, keeping our population younger and ensuring that our society will continue to grow. It’s disingenuous to long for a U.S. baby boom while punishing and scapegoating the very people who are doing the most to keep our birth rate steady.

*If you’re into cultural history, Colin Woodard’s book American Nations is a fascinating exploration of how patterns of migration shaped the unique character of different parts of the U.S., from the Quakers in PA to the Scots-Irish in Appalachia.

**I was born in Springfield, Ohio, so I know what’s up. Also, I don’t have room to get into the science here, but there is also lots of evidence that a more diverse gene pool makes us more resistant to disease. Diversity in human leukocyte antigens helps us resist inflammation, for example, and other forms of diversity help reduce risk of inherited illness and make us more adaptive. The “race scientists” never talk about this, or about epigenetics at all, really, because they’re too busy recycling already-refuted essentialist myths from the 1980s.