Both supporters and critics of lax immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border speak about how it serves to funnel in a “replacement population.” Its critics say that it is Democrat politicians’ efforts to design a new (and indebted) electorate, the kind of global gerrymander of which the left approves.
But open-border supporters also defend importing a “replacement population,” even if they avoid that term. Furthermore, that notion is no recent idea for them. If you listen to Democrat politicians like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, we need expanded immigration because Americans aren’t having babies, and we need workers.
Such is the latest variation on the theme “we need immigrants to do work Americans won’t,” long the mantra of the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate bodies that favor importing cheap labor. If Americans won’t work (or have American babies who will work in the future), then let’s import our workforce!
It’s paradoxical that, although Kamala Harris has put abortion on demand through birth front and center in her campaign (one of the few things about which she’s clear on her position and can address minus a teleprompter), few people connect the demand for abortion with the demand for open borders as a way of building an American workforce. Let’s explore some of those connections.
First, most of the folks who advocate for promoting abortion also promote open borders. It’s not that they regret the plummeting in American fertility that regrettably has to be replaced by foreign bodies. No. When J.D. Vance pointed out the national security question posed by our declining fertility, the unanimous Democrat and media (but I repeat myself) howl was that the Ohio Senator is “weird.”
Well, let’s dig deeper. Sure, politicians who promote abortion also generally stand for open borders. But so do corporations. When Dobbs came down in 2022, woke corporations fell over one another offering new employee “benefit” plans to pay for abortions. Not abortions and enhanced maternity care. No, it was clear what the responsible corporate “choice” (especially for upward-bound corporate women) was. Corporate women commit themselves to the company. If they’re childless, so much firmer the commitment. We can get foreign women to do the child-birthing as well as the child-caring.
Except, as the Institute for Family Policy has noted, even immigrant fertility is declining. For a long time, it was the fertility of Hispanic women that kept the U.S. fertility rate above the replacement level. That’s no longer true. Does American “acculturation” today also mean alienation from parenthood? If that’s true, then in fact we need permanently open borders, because we will always need some “tired, huddled masses” of females to come and give America a generation or two of children before their “inculturation” turns them away from human parenthood to embrace “fur babies.” Our culture message is that maternity somehow “alienates” women from their true selves. If that’s the case, how do we ensure that our society survives?
It’s not “xenophobic” to think America needs Americans to have American babies...or that American society has an interest in its reproductive survival. In fact, the real unspoken idea underlying such claims is that babies are mere products, commodities whose “production” we can offshore or push down in the economic chain. In fact, it reduces motherhood from a vocation to a mere job...and one not particularly valued, honored, or compensated.
We are in the midst of a profound cultural shift whose implications we refuse to look at because too much of the establishment is invested in consumerist lifestyle libertinism. One reason all societies up to our day were interested in and regulated marriage is that it was the way by which societies perpetuated themselves — and societies had an interest in survival. Only in our time has that instinct of self-preservation been subverted by constant claims of “autonomous individualism,” an isolated individualism that results in even natural things like the man-woman relationship and marriage becoming suspect.
If all this “social progress” was leading to greater general happiness and “joy,” that’s not apparent on the streets of America. Depression and suicide among minors are growing. Marriage is delayed or deferred until one of the latest points in life on record. Even if surveys suggest that working women want the labor market to be reconfigured to enable them to spend time with their young children rather than farm them out to state-sponsored daycare, neither mainstream politicians, leading corporations, nor the vocal feminist “thinkers” are having any of it. And the man-woman dance that usually marked twenty-somethings’ path to parenthood has become so estranged that it’s not so much “men are from Mars and women from Venus” as maybe “men are from Mercury and women are from Pluto.”
No doubt, those interested in short-term political advantage and out-of-context talking points will also consider these reflections “weird.” But the intellectual dishonesty undergirding such refusal to engage the question really comes back to one word: the “sacred” right to abortion that denies fathers a say in the deaths of their unborn children, parents a say in knowing (much less consenting to) their minor daughters’ abortions, and society’s interest in its demographic shrinking and dying.
I can assure you that no Democratic politician will ask about the impact of 65,000,000+ abortions since Roe v. Wade on our workforce, even if one considers that those sacrificed back in 1973–74 would be coming up on 30 years in that workforce (and 30 years of contributions into Social Security). And though they might babble about “it takes a village” and “the community’s children,” they deny the community any interest in promoting children or how the village gets populated.
No, in order to protect abortion, they enforce a vow of silence surrounding that question and its social impact, one more rigorous than the Mafia’s omertà, even if it means society’s aging, shrinking, and dying. And they call us “weird”?
Image via Pexels.
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