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Jack A. Goldstone's avatar

For those interested in why we can't just encourage native-born Americans to have more babies, two facts to recognize. First, US fertility is 1.66. No pro-natal program anywhere in the world has raised fertility from under 1.7 to 2.1 or higher (the level needed just for replacement. To get population growth it would have to go to 2.4 or higher). As long as women need to work full-time to contribute to family incomes, most don't want any more than 2 kids. Given that others have zero or one, the average remains below 2.0. No level of support has changed this. NO COUNTRY IN EUROPE has fertility above 1.9, despite a plethora of programs. Hungary's program has only raised fertility from 1.25 in 2010 to 1.55 in in 2019; still much lower than in the US! Second, even if we could raise fertility, that would not start boosting the labor force for almost 20 years (kids have to be raised and educated before they can work). Immigrants start working from day 1. They provide immediate benefits to the labor force, social security revenues, rents, etc.

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Brian Murphy's avatar

I feel as though a mass number of people liberal or conservative would agree that Immigration is a good thing! it gets to become a problem when too many people are coming in, because a lot of the stats that you gave were about the people who were returned not how many crossed the border, Biden might return 600,000 illegals, but how many are allowed to stay due to an unsecure border? it may be true that Obama returned more than Trump, but how many people tried to cross when Trump was president. probably less than when Obama was. The more people that try to cross the easier it is to send more people back.

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