Trump’s demographic quagmire
Category: Stock Market & Investments
Via: bob-nelson • 10 months ago • 16 commentsBy: Eduardo Porter
Quagmire is a very useful word to deploy across the spectrum of U.S. policy during the Trump administration.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Indeed, for all the macho talk coming out of the White House about America’s ability to impose its will across the nations of the Western Hemisphere, I expect it soon to be trying to extract itself from a quagmire of its making in Venezuela.
I expect to write about that more this coming week. Today I was hoping to interest you in my latest piece in The Guardian about Trump’s demographic quagmire:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/10/trump-immigration-whiteness
U.S. population growth has slowed to a near standstill. On Wednesday the Congressional Budget Office projected the population would grow by barely 15 million over the next 30 years. And this may be optimistic. According to the CBO, by the end of this decade fewer Americans will be born than die, meaning the native population will start shrinking. Any population growth we get will come from immigration.
And that’s where Trump’s policy of kicking out as many immigrants as he can, sending ICE agents across urban America in search of immigrants to deport, running rampage through schools and churches, businesses and workplaces, will get in the way of American prosperity.
Below are a couple of graphs from the latest Census population projections, which are from 2023. You can see the problem. If Trump manages to cut immigration down to nothing, the stated wish of Stephen Miller and the rest of the ethno-nationalist cabal in the White House, America won’t get greater, it will get smaller.
And here’s the rub, even if he achieves this most dystopian of outcomes, Trump will still fail at what he really wants, which is to turn back the clock to some bygone past when the population looked like what you saw in movies with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day.
Trump’s dream of restoring America to some predominantly White nation is a misbegotten fancy. The non-Hispanic white share of the population is going to keep on shrinking even if Trump cuts immigration down to zero. The fact of the matter is that if Trump wants to keep America great, he must let it get browner.
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Why the white America Trump dreams of is just a fantasy
Blocking immigration will not make Trump’s America great again – for the US to shine, he must let it get browner
by Eduardo Porter
about the whiteness of America’s racial stock from ‘foreign’ contamination.
Illustration: stellalevi/Getty Images
Blocking immigration will not make Trump’s America great again – for the US to shine, he must let it get browner
Here’s one reason Donald Trump seems perennially in a bad mood: he has probably figured out that the America he fantasizes about is out of his reach.
However many immigrants he manages to deport or prevent from entering the country, the white paradise he is promising his Maga base, free of Somalis, Mexican “rapists” and generally people from “shithole countries” – closer in hue to the America where he was born – is not his to offer.
He can, however, do a lot of damage. By doing his best to make the US unbearable both to foreigners and, more generally, people from ethnicities that do not mesh with his picture of the American family, Trump is not Making America Great Again. He is ensuring America will be smaller, older, weaker and easier to push around.
Even zeroing-out immigration altogether will be insufficient to restore the bygone America that Trump yearns for. Whatever he does to get rid of immigrants will not stop the non-Hispanic white footprint from shrinking.
Trump is not the first politician to try to protect their conviction about the whiteness of America’s racial stock from “foreign” contamination. The national-origin immigration quotas in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were quite successful at doing this. In 1960, 75% of immigrants to the US came from Europe.
But the levee broke. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 replaced national-origin with family ties . These days only about 10% of immigrants hail from Europe. More than half come from Latin America . When Trump was four, white people accounted for nine in 10 Americans (the census did not ask about Hispanic ethnicity). By 2024, the non-Hispanic white share had slid to 57.5%.
Nothing Trump does to stop immigration can change this trajectory. Because the non-Hispanic white population will keep on shrinking regardless, the Census Bureau projects that it will lose 3.6 million people over the next five years, almost 11 million in the decade after that and more than 14 million in the subsequent one.
And that means that if Trump and his ethnonationalist sidekick Stephen Miller achieve their goal of cutting future immigration down to nothing, the US population will shrink pretty sharply. It will be 6% smaller by mid-century, 10% smaller by 2060 and one-third smaller in 2100. The president may not fully realize this – his grasp of economics has proven tenuous – the demographic squeeze would come at a substantial cost.
The population will not merely shrink. It will get old, because the population of working age will shrink even faster. Today, people over 65 account for about one-fifth of the population. In a zero-immigration scenario, their share will rise to one-quarter by mid-century and over one-third by its end, supported by a shrinking labor force.
The data does preoccupy people in the White House. Their prescription, however, is as unrealistic as the rest of their dreams: to boost American fertility, which has been falling over the last two decades and is now at 1.6 children per woman of reproductive age, substantially below the roughly 2.1 replacement rate needed to stabilize the population.
Part of the problem is that declining fertility is a global phenomenon that scholars do not fully understand . It is happening not only in rich and middle-income countries but also in the world’s poorest countries, where fertility remains comparatively high. Pronatalist policies in developed nations, including child benefits, broader provision of childcare and other family supports, have had a limited impact on families’ propensity to have kids.
The other problem is that the proposed solutions from the Trump administration border on the absurd . They include a “National Medal of Motherhood” for particularly fecund mothers, fertility tracking classes and $1,000 to be deposited into “Trump accounts” for babies born during his presidency. These come amid a torrent of policies that will make childbearing tougher, such as cuts to federal support for children’s healthcare and nutrition, courtesy of the president’s tax-cutting bill.
Trump’s problem, in a nutshell, is that the one straightforward policy approach to ease America’s demographic challenge is to rely on people for whom he has expressed unconstrained disgust: non-white immigrants.
In the Census Bureau’s high immigration scenario – in which net immigration averages some 1.5m per year – the US population would grow 13% by 2050 and 28% by the end of the century. The 65-plus share would not hit one quarter until 2070.
One challenge to this scenario is that there may not be sufficient immigrants available to keep propping up the American population, especially as fertility rates drop in Latin America and Asia too. Net immigration to the US averaged 1.8m per year between 2020 and 2024, driven by a surge after the Covid pandemic. But it only hit about 900,000 a year in the decade before that.
The bigger conundrum for the president is another, though. The unadulterated, non-Hispanic white footprint will shrink under any scenario. But if immigration is high, it will drop faster: from 58% of the population this year to under 47% in 2050. The Hispanic share would rise from just under 20% to almost 26%.
The challenge must be torturing the guy: if Trump wants to keep America great, he must let it get browner.
Immigration is actually increasing the size of the white demographic in the United States. Immigration is actually making the United States whiter. There really are a large number of Hispanic immigrants who are also classified as 'white alone'. Open border immigration actually pushes a 'brown majority' out of reach. Also keep in mind that Hispanics have a European colonial heritage. Open border immigration is reinforcing the European heritage of the United States.
Why people delude themselves into believing a 'brown majority' will change anything defies understanding. Hispanic immigration really is making the United States more white, more European, and more Christian.
Race is arbitrary. Italians were not considered White in 1900.
So if we consider people whose ancestors didn't come from Africa to be White, then you're right, of course.
OTOH... it's probable that ALL homo sap's ancestors came from Africa, so...
No, race is not arbitrary. Equating ethnicity and race is political and not scientific. So, the idea of a 'brown majority' is not a scientific conclusion; it is a political trope.
Yes, all of the Homo sapiens ancestors came from Africa. But recent findings raises questions about Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo Sapiens originating in Africa. That could explain why fossils of 'missing links' are scarce in Africa.
So the replacement theory is real, again?
It's so hard to keep track. For years the left bragged about shifting demographics through immigration ensured their winning perpetual control of the government. Then Republicans noticed what the left was bragging about and suddenly it became a hate crime to point out what the left had been bragging about.
And now the left is back to promoting the inevitability of demographic replacement.
Step 4.. The problem is Republicans noticing.
The dems used to say demography is destiny.
Now it is obvious.
What I find fascinating is your, and Sean's, blythe presumption that the only "correct" America is a White America.[✘]
Quote?
[✘] Why don't you just admit that you want to change the demographics of America?
That's your imagination because I wrote nor implied any such thing. That's your own perceptions of who counts as Americans being projected onto others. First and his culture is just as affected as the white Americans you obsess about .
What's reality is you are, yet again, championing the benefits of replacement theory for your political party. It's good you've stopped the denial at least.
“What I find fascinating is your, and Sean's, blythe presumption that the only "correct" America is a White America”
What i find fascinating is where the fuck you saw that in their comments. Please post some quotes to back up that idiotic claim.
I want America's demographics to be whatever. Any other approach is racist.
Everything you write says this explicitly.
"None so blind..."
So you can’t back up that idiotic claim, got it.
So you wouldn't object if Trump decides to import three million Afrikaners and close immigration to everyone else?
Why the hell does the United States need population growth? The United States of 1950 had a population size of about 150 million. That 1950s United States led the world in scientific development, technological progress, manufacturing might, and military domination. A smaller population certainly did not hamper the United States.
The narrative that the United States needs more people is driven by phony economics that exploits the consumer base for consistently increasing profit. That's an arbitrary need to maintain a moronic economic theory based on monetary policy rather than true productivity. If economic growth only depends upon more consumers then something is seriously out of whack. That means the entire economic policy of the United States has been based upon an unrealistic lie.
The United States was more innovative, productive, competitive, and prosperous when the population size was much smaller. There is too much data available to ignore the facts.