News from the US Census Bureau:
If it weren't for Hispanic births, the U.S. could be confronting long-term population declines similar to those in Germany, Japan and other industrialized countries.Hispanics are the only ethnic group now producing more than two children per family, according to a Census Bureau report released Monday. That's the number necessary to replace the mother and father and keep the population stable.
"The Hispanic population is growing; whites and Asians are not replacing themselves," said Jane Dye, the Census Bureau demographer who wrote the study.The average U.S. woman produces 1.9 children, but broken down by ethnicity, the numbers are 1.7 for Asian Americans, 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites, 2.0 for blacks and 2.3 for Hispanics. American Indians and Native Americans weren't included in the report. The fertility rates are sufficient, combined with immigration, to keep the U.S. population growing.
Another press report on the same Census findings pointed out that the longer a Hispanic mother has been in the US (over generations), the less likely she is to maintain an above-replacement fertility rate. So it's Hispanic immigrants who are keeping the US from turning into a nursing home in the near long term.
Some non-Hispanics may not like the Hispanicization of the US, but if they aren't going to have bigger families, or families at all, they ought to be grateful for it, considering the alternative. Here's Philip Longman:
Declining fertility rates at first bring a "demographic dividend." That dividend has to be repaid, however, if the trend continues. Although at first the fact that there are fewer children to feed, clothe, and educate leaves more for adults to enjoy, soon enough, if fertility falls beneath replacement levels, the number of productive workers drops as well, and the number of dependent elderly increase. And these older citizens consume far more resources than children do. Even after considering the cost of education, a typical child in the United States consumes 28 percent less than the typical working-age adult, whereas elders consume 27 percent more, mostly in health-related expenses.
Largely because of this imbalance, population aging, once it begins creating more seniors than workers, puts severe strains on government budgets. In Germany, for example, public spending on pensions, even after accounting for a reduction in future benefits written into current law, is expected to swell from an already staggering 10.3 percent of GDP to 15.4 percent by 2040 -- even as the number of workers available to support each retiree shrinks from 2.6 to 1.4. Meanwhile, the cost of government health-care benefits for the elderly is expected to rise from today's 3.8 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent by 2040.
(More Longman after the jump)
UPDATE: As I should have cautioned before posting, and as at least one reader has mentioned, higher Hispanic fertility rates are not a good thing if they're driven primarily by out-of-wedlock births. Illegitimacy brings with it a whole host of serious social problems. Here's a link to the US Census Bureau study. I'll be in meetings most of the morning, and won't have time to go through the data. Perhaps one or more of you can do so, and determine to what extent the higher Hispanic rate is based on children born to unmarried women.
Longman, cont'd:
Population aging also depresses the growth of government revenues. Population growth is a major source of economic growth: more people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amid a shrinking population, but in the real world, it has never happened. A nation's GDP is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per worker. Thus a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an economy's growth potential. When the size of the work force falls, economic growth can occur only if productivity increases enough to compensate. And these increases would have to be substantial to offset the impact of aging. Italy, for example, expects its working-age population to plunge 41 percent by 2050 -- meaning that output per worker would have to increase by at least that amount just to keep Italy's economic growth rate from falling below zero. With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will therefore depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants), even as it has to tax them at higher and higher rates to pay for old-age pensions and health care.
My complaint has always been with the illegality of much of the Hispanic immigration to this country. But there's a good economic case to make that in the macro sense, we need these immigrants and their children. But this is only a temporary fix to the birth dearth problem; fertility rates have collapsed in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America -- and indeed, as Longman writes, the world over. Where are tomorrow's fertile immigrants going to come from? At some point, Americans who have lived here for generations are either going to have to start having bigger families, or get used to a very different way of living. Which is to say that no matter which option we choose, we're going to have to get used to a very different way of living.
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quote: "rr, since murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, abortion is not murder."
During the Second World War, it wasn't against the law in Nazi controlled territory for German soldiers to kill Jews and others deemed racially inferior. By your logic, therefore, Jews killed during the Holocaust weren't murdered. Of course this wasn't the case because murder is act with both legal and ethical ramifications. Sometimes, unfortunately, laws aren't very ethical, as is the case with our current abortion laws.
rr
A fair amount of the low birth rate comes from infertility (and not all of that derives from waiting "too long" to have children.) Both men and women are affected (just google diminishing sperm counts and be prepared to read for hours.) There's something about our modern life that seems to be especially toxic to fertility.
There's something about our modern life that seems to be especially toxic to fertility.
Yep. Know toxins that statistically correlate with low birth rates: feminism, materialism, atheism. These are very hazardous to one's future potential offspring.
"The fact remains that PP kill thousands upon thousands of children each year."
God himself "kills" thousands of "children" every year by flushing about 1/3 of first term pregnancies out of the uterus during menstruation. Of course, these "children" are about the size of a pencil tip, so no one really notices.
Nevertheless-- how barbaric! How cruel! Something must be done about this atrocity.
As somebody who's apparently concerned about the environment and animals (which includes us), it's hard to fathom why Dreher is praising this news. Overpopulation, especially when it involves certain groups, is harmful to both developing and developed countries. And while higly qualified immigration can be beneficial for first world nations, unskilled immigration isn't.
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