I agree with this essay with one quibble: considering that caring for the elderly is a growing need and if many of the people doing so are immigrants who likely do not have a college degree (because they are from countries that have a low college degree penetration), then I think we need to have immigration from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
I think we would do well to remove degrees from the equation that defines skill and immigration eligibility altogether. There are plenty of foreign tradesmen that never went to school but could start earning $100K+ the day they land and plenty of basket weaving majors that have no value at all.
Noah, you say that well educated immigrants do not contribute to national debt. But are the well-educated immigrants the ones who will care for the elderly? Perhaps the less well-educated immigrants make a unique contribution by being willing to do the care work that better educated people avoid.
I wonder if that graph on the fiscal impact of immigrants includes the change in cost of labor for the caring jobs that the government disproportionately hires people to do.
Thank you David, you beat me to the punch! I was just about to say: Noah says we need to bring in immigrants to care for old folks, but then contradicts himself by saying we need college kids coming in. Well which is it? Some mixture of both it sounds like.
I am an immigrant to the US. I came here in the early 1980s on an H-1 visa, then a green card, now a citizen. One thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate is the one of the US's unique strengths is it is brilliant at taking the best people from all over the world. I worked at a company where the CEO was Israeli and the CTO was Iranian. Try doing that in any other country. US-born citizens underestimate this since they know very little about how immigration works (I used to love asking people 'what color is a greeen card?' back when the answer was pink since most Americans have never seen a green card).
I lived in France for several years. It doesn't have birthright citizenship. If you are born in France you are not automatically French (unless one of your parents is, of course). But there is a second-generation get-out-of-jail-free rule. If you are born in France, and your mother was born in France, even if she is not French, then you get birthright citizenship. This prevents what I think happens in Germany where Turkish immigrants can be there for multiple generations without any of them being German.
That sounds like an inhumane way to train a dog not to pee on the floor - I feel sad that so many bloggers think it's professionally important to subject themselves to that!
"America is not North Korea; we’re not even Japan or Sweden"
In Sweden, approximately 21.4% of the population is foreign-born as of 2024. In comparison, about 13.7% of the U.S. population is foreign-born as of 2021.
The extreme positions on both sides are horrible like you say. I like your take on this. Why would it be so terrible to have targeted legal immigration as a policy? Open borders with a fraud filled welfare system is something warned about many years ago. " All muslims bad," is pretty asinine as well. Let's get people who share in building block American values and want to contribute no matter where they are from and what they look like. That's how my family got here generations ago.
There's no birthright citizenship in many Western countries and it's an unusual practice that becomes increasingly inappropriate for illegal immigrants and those who just drop in pregnant in order to deliver an anchor baby. I met such a woman once, and I could certainly relate to it, especially as an immigrant, but I still didn't like it. The sacred cow of the text of the Constitution is a burden, from my old Euro perspective. The 14th amendment just isn't as bad as the 2nd one, for instance. A well regulated militia as understood in the 18th and 18th centuries, really? None of this makes any sense. Not the blood and soil fascism nor the leftist open borders or no-borders-at-all program. The fringes nominate their favorites in closed primaries and the citizenry reads and watches only what it likes. This is just one more instance of it. But I think Noah probably underestimates how angry many people are when their home increasingly looks and feels like something culturally alien. The pace of immigration has been too quick all over the West. It's not a question of what's right. Most people just can't handle it.
The 2nd amendment makes perfect sense when you consider the 30K Iranian protestors that were just mowed down by their government. But I agree with everything else.
Handguns don't do shit against helicopter gunships and an army willing to use them, as Saddam Hussein demonstrated against both Kurdish and Shia rebels. Unless you're going to claim the Second Amendment defends the right of individuals to own things like Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and rocket propelled grenades, STFU about the Second Amendment being about protecting people from the government.
It's possible that I have been naturalized longer than you've been alive. Some Old Euro ideas would be great to bring back even to contemporary Europe, let alone the US. For instance the social contract. A CEO making 9x of a worker in the 70s in Germany. Not 90x or 900x. I could go on.
Here is an idea to kick around. The current wave of anti-immigration, xenophobia, and the rise of MAGA are born from the decline of population that has already occurred. I was born, raised and spent most of my life in what is today a MAGA county. The population here peaked in the 1940 census and has declined ever since. Many rural counties have the same decline and they all vote red. The population decline is coupled with small businesses closing their doors on a main street that is now deserted as the remaining residents shop at the Dollar General on the edge of town or at the Walmart 40 miles away where their job happens to be. Also the young people who do well in school or are entrepreneurial leave for better opportunity elsewhere further fueling the decline. Those left feel as if they don't count economically or politically and have become quite reactionary. As someone with an economics degree I know that technology is at the root of these changes and that money transfers (medicaid, farm subsidies, etc) from urban ares are the life raft these counties float upon but that is all cold porridge to a society in decline. We have a real time example of how population decline can tear the social fabric.
The Republicans would have done better for themselves if they had issued a much more limited executive order that specifically targeted birth tourism and very recently entered illegals. Something like no citizenship to any child whose parents had entered the country less than 30 days before the birth illegally or on a tourist visa. It would make the Democrats look like absolute morons for zealously defending it. And no matter how unusual this case is, a favorable ruling would have got them what they wanted which is an end to blanket birthright. Going from 30 days to 5 years is a lot easier than going from 0 to 30 days.
The Constitution is actually clear on this. The senators who debated this in the 1860's said that this would apply to someone who just stepped off a ship that day.
In the 1860s we had open borders so the woman who just stepped off the boat was legal. The absence of the entire category of illegal immigrants at the time maybe gives a bit of room for maneuver. In any event this would be much less of a stretch than other obvious daily constitutional violations that the courts have ignored for decades.
I think the question is what about people that stepped of the plane that day, gave birth and then turned around and went back to China to raise their kid there.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. What the law does say and what it ought to say are often two different questions.
(And it might actually be constitutional for Congress to say that the actions of parents that gave birth in the United States while on a tourist visa, left the United States with their child, and raised that child as a citizen of another country amount to "voluntary relinquishment" of that child's US citizenship. But that's also not what the actual law says right now, and it's also a lot harder to say with a straight face that someone that has tried or wanted to try to raise their child within the US as a US citizen - such as many undocumented parents - has voluntarily given up said citizenship.)
agreed, and better yet, passed a law like that. Because congress codified the traditional understanding of the 14th amendment in the 40's and 50's. Thus you need a new law to undo that.
But Trump doesn't care about lasting change, just throwing red meat to the base
I think we need to touch grass a bit sometimes as people who sit close to data and think hard about things. Of the kind of median folk I grew up around, pretty much all of them believe that population growth is bad. I don't know if it's first order thinking derived from "there's too much traffic" or "this line is too long" but people's basic intuition is that things are bad because there are too many of us.
Some people only remember all the panic caused by Erhlich’s The Population Bomb and don’t realize the global population will soon be in free fall. Maybe they’re also touching (or smoking) too much grass. Too much traffic is probably due to inadequate spending on roads and transit, which is made worse if you reduce the number of taxpayers and construction workers. Usually, when a line is too long it means the service provider didn’t hire enough workers or invest in automation, not that there are too many customers.
infinite population growth on a finite world would obviously be a problem. But we get problems as well from population decline especially rapid decline like some nations are experiencing
This issue has been needlessly moralized. It is tough to talk immigration using basic problem solving or cost benefit analysis like you've done here. The loudest, most extreme voices on the right and left have turned this into a moral issue.
I do appreciate you tying this back into the birth rate issue. If all of the people who scream for immigration restriction would start cranking out 8-12 kids a pop like people did decades ago, we probably would have a decent TFR and then I'd be more open to hearing them out regarding increasing immigration restriction. But if they're not willing to dismantle the welfare state, and they're not willing to triple or quadruple the number of kids they're having, it's hard to take immigration restrictionists seriously. Cause those are the only valid options we have. End the welfare state for senior citizens, dramatically increase fertility, or expand immigration.
Right, but that's not enough. As I show in a comment below they need to be well above replacement so that the overall average TFR goes up enough. Some rough napkin math in my comment below suggests immigration restrictionists need to get up to around a 6.0 TFR.
I meant the subset that wants immigration restricted needs to massively increase their own fertility.
Imagine the population split into two components, immigration restrictionists and non immigration restrictionists.
The non immigration restrictionists would be some 70-80% of the population. Their TFR is 1.5. If we need to pull our total TFR up to healthy levels (2.2-2.5ish) that remaining 20% needs to be very high.
Total TFR = % immigration restrictionists * immigration restrictionist TFR + % not immigration restrictionists * non immigration restrictionists TFR
2.5 = 0.20(TFR for immigration restrictionists) + 0.80(1.5)
=> 1.3 = 0.20 TFR
TFR for immigration restrictionists = 6.5
In this model.
TLDR: if someone personally wants to restrict immigration, they need to crank out kids to be part of the solution.
Great piece Noah. Your commentaries seem to often focus on taking dispassionate, logical approaches to polarizing problems (immigration, national debt, entitlements, income inequality, healthcare, etc.) and coming up with pragmatic solutions. Sounds great to me. But, unfortunately, those solutions are only appreciated by those who are plugged into reality. My impression is that most Americans are more concerned about whether their football team will win each weekend or whether their politician entertains them when they listen to their 10 second soundbites once or twice per week, than they are about coming up with sensical, bipartisan solutions to complex problems. When it comes to these polarizing issues, the average person would rather be angry and complain with only a simple view of the problem, rather than strive to feel fulfilled and appreciative by a nuanced solution.
As you note immigration is only a short term fix for fertility declines. Moreover, it's quite clear Americans will only tolerate so much immigration so fast. Biden levels of immigration even if it was all 100% legal would be too much.
Thus we are going to need to turn things around I suggest something like the following
1. Greatly increase the child tax credit, start with something like $10k a year for kids under 6, and maybe $5k a year till 18. If that doesn't move the needle, then bump it up to $15k or even $20k
2. Build a ton more houses, many people won't start trying to have kids till they are in their own home. My wife and I for example refused to have kids in our apartment. We even moved in with my parents for 2 years to save up money to afford the house, and even then we still got lucky because we bought in 2010, a short window when homes prices made sense (at least in CA).
3. Start sponsoring a lot of pro family stuff out of Hollywood and from influencers. We will need to change the culture. It's easy for people without kids to understand how much of a pain in the ass kids can be. But it's really hard to understand just how great they are till you have them.
I know I was very much on the fence about having kids, my wife REALLY wanted them, so finally I said yes. She was right, I was wrong. You think you know what love is, then you have kids and realize you didn't really understand.
“The Incredibles” is a great pro-family Hollywood movie. Elastigirl/Mrs. Incredible is a happy mother of three, and she clearly loves her children, and she can still suit up and kick ass when someone threatens her family. Mr. Incredible says to his family at one point, “You are my greatest adventure, and I almost missed it.” Awwww
The dairy industry in New England would not survive without illegal immigrants, very few of which have college degrees or need college degrees to be good at their work. There is very little chance of filling these jobs with US citizens. The US needs a broad range of immigrants because there is a broad range of jobs to be filled.
There is no chance of filling those jobs with US citizens because the wages are depressed by the illegals flooding the labor supply and the US citizens have access to employment in the parts of the economy where laws against hiring illegals are actually enforced. It's essentially Feudalism Lite, and they are the peasants. Of course the higher classes don't want their jobs.
The industry would survive just fine without them. Laborer income would increase a lot. The price of dairy products would increase and people would buy less. Some farms would go out of business. But the industry would be just fine, same as it is in Denmark that doesn't have a massive illegal cheap labor force.
All most all of the dairy farms in New England have gone out of business except for the few relatively large operations using immigrant labor or that are very highly automated.
A creative, alternative solution to population decline is aggressively increasing funding for biomedical research targeting the biology of aging to ameliorate age-related ill health and possibly increase healthy lifespan. Age-related illness is indeed the main driver of healthcare costs, and caregiving is enormous strain on the economy. If people maintained their health for longer, the caregiving burden would be greatly alleviated. Additionally, when people retain healthy function, they often work longer, whether because they just like working or because they didn't save/invest enough in earlier years and simply need to; being healthy also allows for volunteer time or unpaid work like taking care of grandchildren.
It's true that if the field led to longer (healthier) lifespans, there would be additional costs like more years of social security benefits, but the benefits of making a major dent in age-related disability would be far greater. ARPA-H, NIA, and private industry are doing great work, but geroscience is severely underfunded compared to the benefits it could bring. Increasing healthy lifespan is a real possibility to address population decline that so many worry about, and maintaining or restoring health is good in and of itself.
Australia is a high immigration country with 32% born overseas vs 15% in US. However Australia has a very well defined high skills immigration policy that basically brings in high earning tax payers, without paying for their childhood or education. Often these people bring a lot of assets and investment. They typically commit almost no crime and their kids are ambitious and hardworking. They do bring in family members but they similarly tend to be positive additions. These people make up the majority of immigrants and are nearly all from India and China. Australia also has a much smaller but generous refugee resettlement program mainly from Africa and Middle East. The generosity of Australians is rewarded as we now we have machete gangs, home invasions, carjackings, welfare dependency etc, almost exclusively from this group.
I agree with this essay with one quibble: considering that caring for the elderly is a growing need and if many of the people doing so are immigrants who likely do not have a college degree (because they are from countries that have a low college degree penetration), then I think we need to have immigration from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
Yeah we're obviously not going to cut "low skilled" immigration to 0.
But note that most people who work in the health care industry have college degrees.
Not home health care aides.
We’ll have robots to help. Immigrants with degrees might be playing a support role in servicing and supervising robots and AI healthcare workers.
Not if people are cheaper than extremely sophisticated care robots.
I think we would do well to remove degrees from the equation that defines skill and immigration eligibility altogether. There are plenty of foreign tradesmen that never went to school but could start earning $100K+ the day they land and plenty of basket weaving majors that have no value at all.
Dave, I just expressed the same idea.
Noah, you say that well educated immigrants do not contribute to national debt. But are the well-educated immigrants the ones who will care for the elderly? Perhaps the less well-educated immigrants make a unique contribution by being willing to do the care work that better educated people avoid.
Brilliant minds….
I wonder if that graph on the fiscal impact of immigrants includes the change in cost of labor for the caring jobs that the government disproportionately hires people to do.
Good point about knock-on effects.
Thank you David, you beat me to the punch! I was just about to say: Noah says we need to bring in immigrants to care for old folks, but then contradicts himself by saying we need college kids coming in. Well which is it? Some mixture of both it sounds like.
I totally agree.
The answer to the question "Who's gonna change your momma's bedpan at the nursing home?" is not "an immigrant with a master's degree."
I am an immigrant to the US. I came here in the early 1980s on an H-1 visa, then a green card, now a citizen. One thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate is the one of the US's unique strengths is it is brilliant at taking the best people from all over the world. I worked at a company where the CEO was Israeli and the CTO was Iranian. Try doing that in any other country. US-born citizens underestimate this since they know very little about how immigration works (I used to love asking people 'what color is a greeen card?' back when the answer was pink since most Americans have never seen a green card).
I lived in France for several years. It doesn't have birthright citizenship. If you are born in France you are not automatically French (unless one of your parents is, of course). But there is a second-generation get-out-of-jail-free rule. If you are born in France, and your mother was born in France, even if she is not French, then you get birthright citizenship. This prevents what I think happens in Germany where Turkish immigrants can be there for multiple generations without any of them being German.
Where do you find these losers on Twitter who seem to exist only to prove the wildest fantasies of their foes right?
Twitter is a magical colosseum which finds you the people who disagree with you the most and rubs their posts in your face all day.
That sounds like an inhumane way to train a dog not to pee on the floor - I feel sad that so many bloggers think it's professionally important to subject themselves to that!
"America is not North Korea; we’re not even Japan or Sweden"
In Sweden, approximately 21.4% of the population is foreign-born as of 2024. In comparison, about 13.7% of the U.S. population is foreign-born as of 2021.
The extreme positions on both sides are horrible like you say. I like your take on this. Why would it be so terrible to have targeted legal immigration as a policy? Open borders with a fraud filled welfare system is something warned about many years ago. " All muslims bad," is pretty asinine as well. Let's get people who share in building block American values and want to contribute no matter where they are from and what they look like. That's how my family got here generations ago.
There's no birthright citizenship in many Western countries and it's an unusual practice that becomes increasingly inappropriate for illegal immigrants and those who just drop in pregnant in order to deliver an anchor baby. I met such a woman once, and I could certainly relate to it, especially as an immigrant, but I still didn't like it. The sacred cow of the text of the Constitution is a burden, from my old Euro perspective. The 14th amendment just isn't as bad as the 2nd one, for instance. A well regulated militia as understood in the 18th and 18th centuries, really? None of this makes any sense. Not the blood and soil fascism nor the leftist open borders or no-borders-at-all program. The fringes nominate their favorites in closed primaries and the citizenry reads and watches only what it likes. This is just one more instance of it. But I think Noah probably underestimates how angry many people are when their home increasingly looks and feels like something culturally alien. The pace of immigration has been too quick all over the West. It's not a question of what's right. Most people just can't handle it.
The 2nd amendment makes perfect sense when you consider the 30K Iranian protestors that were just mowed down by their government. But I agree with everything else.
Handguns don't do shit against helicopter gunships and an army willing to use them, as Saddam Hussein demonstrated against both Kurdish and Shia rebels. Unless you're going to claim the Second Amendment defends the right of individuals to own things like Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and rocket propelled grenades, STFU about the Second Amendment being about protecting people from the government.
Most new world countries have birth right citizenship. Its not about the Western or non Western as much as Western Hemisphere.
Please, if you do immigrate here, don’t naturalize because we don’t need more old Euro ideas put into law.
It's possible that I have been naturalized longer than you've been alive. Some Old Euro ideas would be great to bring back even to contemporary Europe, let alone the US. For instance the social contract. A CEO making 9x of a worker in the 70s in Germany. Not 90x or 900x. I could go on.
Yes, it's the dream of every freedom loving American to have the govt tell them how much money they're allowed to make.
Here is an idea to kick around. The current wave of anti-immigration, xenophobia, and the rise of MAGA are born from the decline of population that has already occurred. I was born, raised and spent most of my life in what is today a MAGA county. The population here peaked in the 1940 census and has declined ever since. Many rural counties have the same decline and they all vote red. The population decline is coupled with small businesses closing their doors on a main street that is now deserted as the remaining residents shop at the Dollar General on the edge of town or at the Walmart 40 miles away where their job happens to be. Also the young people who do well in school or are entrepreneurial leave for better opportunity elsewhere further fueling the decline. Those left feel as if they don't count economically or politically and have become quite reactionary. As someone with an economics degree I know that technology is at the root of these changes and that money transfers (medicaid, farm subsidies, etc) from urban ares are the life raft these counties float upon but that is all cold porridge to a society in decline. We have a real time example of how population decline can tear the social fabric.
The Republicans would have done better for themselves if they had issued a much more limited executive order that specifically targeted birth tourism and very recently entered illegals. Something like no citizenship to any child whose parents had entered the country less than 30 days before the birth illegally or on a tourist visa. It would make the Democrats look like absolute morons for zealously defending it. And no matter how unusual this case is, a favorable ruling would have got them what they wanted which is an end to blanket birthright. Going from 30 days to 5 years is a lot easier than going from 0 to 30 days.
The Constitution is actually clear on this. The senators who debated this in the 1860's said that this would apply to someone who just stepped off a ship that day.
In the 1860s we had open borders so the woman who just stepped off the boat was legal. The absence of the entire category of illegal immigrants at the time maybe gives a bit of room for maneuver. In any event this would be much less of a stretch than other obvious daily constitutional violations that the courts have ignored for decades.
I think the question is what about people that stepped of the plane that day, gave birth and then turned around and went back to China to raise their kid there.
Are they really under the jurisdiction thereof?
If their kid returns to the US one day, he or she would be.
In the instance I outlined above, I don't think that kid should be a US citizen
That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. What the law does say and what it ought to say are often two different questions.
(And it might actually be constitutional for Congress to say that the actions of parents that gave birth in the United States while on a tourist visa, left the United States with their child, and raised that child as a citizen of another country amount to "voluntary relinquishment" of that child's US citizenship. But that's also not what the actual law says right now, and it's also a lot harder to say with a straight face that someone that has tried or wanted to try to raise their child within the US as a US citizen - such as many undocumented parents - has voluntarily given up said citizenship.)
Agreed with all of that.
But either way, if you wanted to change it, you would at least need congress to pass a new law
agreed, and better yet, passed a law like that. Because congress codified the traditional understanding of the 14th amendment in the 40's and 50's. Thus you need a new law to undo that.
But Trump doesn't care about lasting change, just throwing red meat to the base
I think we need to touch grass a bit sometimes as people who sit close to data and think hard about things. Of the kind of median folk I grew up around, pretty much all of them believe that population growth is bad. I don't know if it's first order thinking derived from "there's too much traffic" or "this line is too long" but people's basic intuition is that things are bad because there are too many of us.
Some people only remember all the panic caused by Erhlich’s The Population Bomb and don’t realize the global population will soon be in free fall. Maybe they’re also touching (or smoking) too much grass. Too much traffic is probably due to inadequate spending on roads and transit, which is made worse if you reduce the number of taxpayers and construction workers. Usually, when a line is too long it means the service provider didn’t hire enough workers or invest in automation, not that there are too many customers.
infinite population growth on a finite world would obviously be a problem. But we get problems as well from population decline especially rapid decline like some nations are experiencing
This issue has been needlessly moralized. It is tough to talk immigration using basic problem solving or cost benefit analysis like you've done here. The loudest, most extreme voices on the right and left have turned this into a moral issue.
I do appreciate you tying this back into the birth rate issue. If all of the people who scream for immigration restriction would start cranking out 8-12 kids a pop like people did decades ago, we probably would have a decent TFR and then I'd be more open to hearing them out regarding increasing immigration restriction. But if they're not willing to dismantle the welfare state, and they're not willing to triple or quadruple the number of kids they're having, it's hard to take immigration restrictionists seriously. Cause those are the only valid options we have. End the welfare state for senior citizens, dramatically increase fertility, or expand immigration.
TBF the side of politics calling for immigration restriction is actually reproducing at replacement rate: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-growing-link-between-marriage-fertility-and-partisanship
Right, but that's not enough. As I show in a comment below they need to be well above replacement so that the overall average TFR goes up enough. Some rough napkin math in my comment below suggests immigration restrictionists need to get up to around a 6.0 TFR.
We don't need to go back to that level of fertility.All we need to do is go back to the level of fertility.In two thousand seven, which is stable
I meant the subset that wants immigration restricted needs to massively increase their own fertility.
Imagine the population split into two components, immigration restrictionists and non immigration restrictionists.
The non immigration restrictionists would be some 70-80% of the population. Their TFR is 1.5. If we need to pull our total TFR up to healthy levels (2.2-2.5ish) that remaining 20% needs to be very high.
Total TFR = % immigration restrictionists * immigration restrictionist TFR + % not immigration restrictionists * non immigration restrictionists TFR
2.5 = 0.20(TFR for immigration restrictionists) + 0.80(1.5)
=> 1.3 = 0.20 TFR
TFR for immigration restrictionists = 6.5
In this model.
TLDR: if someone personally wants to restrict immigration, they need to crank out kids to be part of the solution.
Great piece Noah. Your commentaries seem to often focus on taking dispassionate, logical approaches to polarizing problems (immigration, national debt, entitlements, income inequality, healthcare, etc.) and coming up with pragmatic solutions. Sounds great to me. But, unfortunately, those solutions are only appreciated by those who are plugged into reality. My impression is that most Americans are more concerned about whether their football team will win each weekend or whether their politician entertains them when they listen to their 10 second soundbites once or twice per week, than they are about coming up with sensical, bipartisan solutions to complex problems. When it comes to these polarizing issues, the average person would rather be angry and complain with only a simple view of the problem, rather than strive to feel fulfilled and appreciative by a nuanced solution.
As you note immigration is only a short term fix for fertility declines. Moreover, it's quite clear Americans will only tolerate so much immigration so fast. Biden levels of immigration even if it was all 100% legal would be too much.
Thus we are going to need to turn things around I suggest something like the following
1. Greatly increase the child tax credit, start with something like $10k a year for kids under 6, and maybe $5k a year till 18. If that doesn't move the needle, then bump it up to $15k or even $20k
2. Build a ton more houses, many people won't start trying to have kids till they are in their own home. My wife and I for example refused to have kids in our apartment. We even moved in with my parents for 2 years to save up money to afford the house, and even then we still got lucky because we bought in 2010, a short window when homes prices made sense (at least in CA).
3. Start sponsoring a lot of pro family stuff out of Hollywood and from influencers. We will need to change the culture. It's easy for people without kids to understand how much of a pain in the ass kids can be. But it's really hard to understand just how great they are till you have them.
I know I was very much on the fence about having kids, my wife REALLY wanted them, so finally I said yes. She was right, I was wrong. You think you know what love is, then you have kids and realize you didn't really understand.
“The Incredibles” is a great pro-family Hollywood movie. Elastigirl/Mrs. Incredible is a happy mother of three, and she clearly loves her children, and she can still suit up and kick ass when someone threatens her family. Mr. Incredible says to his family at one point, “You are my greatest adventure, and I almost missed it.” Awwww
The dairy industry in New England would not survive without illegal immigrants, very few of which have college degrees or need college degrees to be good at their work. There is very little chance of filling these jobs with US citizens. The US needs a broad range of immigrants because there is a broad range of jobs to be filled.
There is no chance of filling those jobs with US citizens because the wages are depressed by the illegals flooding the labor supply and the US citizens have access to employment in the parts of the economy where laws against hiring illegals are actually enforced. It's essentially Feudalism Lite, and they are the peasants. Of course the higher classes don't want their jobs.
The industry would survive just fine without them. Laborer income would increase a lot. The price of dairy products would increase and people would buy less. Some farms would go out of business. But the industry would be just fine, same as it is in Denmark that doesn't have a massive illegal cheap labor force.
The Danes cheap labor force is in Malmo Sweden.
Milk is still pretty cheap, maybe those old New England farmers who don’t buy milking machines need to go out of business.
All most all of the dairy farms in New England have gone out of business except for the few relatively large operations using immigrant labor or that are very highly automated.
A creative, alternative solution to population decline is aggressively increasing funding for biomedical research targeting the biology of aging to ameliorate age-related ill health and possibly increase healthy lifespan. Age-related illness is indeed the main driver of healthcare costs, and caregiving is enormous strain on the economy. If people maintained their health for longer, the caregiving burden would be greatly alleviated. Additionally, when people retain healthy function, they often work longer, whether because they just like working or because they didn't save/invest enough in earlier years and simply need to; being healthy also allows for volunteer time or unpaid work like taking care of grandchildren.
It's true that if the field led to longer (healthier) lifespans, there would be additional costs like more years of social security benefits, but the benefits of making a major dent in age-related disability would be far greater. ARPA-H, NIA, and private industry are doing great work, but geroscience is severely underfunded compared to the benefits it could bring. Increasing healthy lifespan is a real possibility to address population decline that so many worry about, and maintaining or restoring health is good in and of itself.
Australia is a high immigration country with 32% born overseas vs 15% in US. However Australia has a very well defined high skills immigration policy that basically brings in high earning tax payers, without paying for their childhood or education. Often these people bring a lot of assets and investment. They typically commit almost no crime and their kids are ambitious and hardworking. They do bring in family members but they similarly tend to be positive additions. These people make up the majority of immigrants and are nearly all from India and China. Australia also has a much smaller but generous refugee resettlement program mainly from Africa and Middle East. The generosity of Australians is rewarded as we now we have machete gangs, home invasions, carjackings, welfare dependency etc, almost exclusively from this group.