On April 9, the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a report by population economist Nicholas Eberstadt, titled, “Can a Depopulating America Still Flourish?” Eberstadt, in his report, asks, “Can America continue to prosper, even if our country veers into an indefinite depopulation? … For the first time in generations — since the Great Depression — the prospect of long-term population decline is again looming on the American horizon.”
Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will examines Eberstadt’s study in his April 24 column. And one of his takeaways is that the United States needs more immigration, not less.
“The Congressional Budget Office projects America becoming what Eberstadt calls a permanently ‘net mortality’ society — deaths exceeding births — in four years, with a million more deaths than births by 2046,” Will explains. “Immigration will delay depopulation until 2056, when the U.S. population will peak at 364 million — just 4 percent more than today because of 0.1 percent growth from 2037 to 2056.”
The Never Trump conservative, now 84, continues, “A depopulating America will be increasingly aged. In perhaps just three years, there will be more 65-plus Americans than children under 18. The fastest growing cohort, the ‘super-old,’ 80-plus, will more than double by 2050.”
Will notes that “long-term population decline,” along with the “increasing life expectancy of an aging population,” would “require people to work longer.”
“This can compensate for an increasingly adverse ratio of workers to retirees that threatens the entitlement (essentially, Social Security and Medicare) state,” Will observes. “Population decline makes it imperative to reverse the decline of the labor force participation rate of Americans aged 15 to 64.”
The second Trump Administration is pursuing an aggressive program of mass deportations. But Will joins Eberstadt in seeing immigration as a positive.
“There is one promising solution,” the conservative columnist argues. “Increasing skilled immigration into our nation, which has, as Eberstadt says, ‘an unusually good knack for turning newcomers into loyal and productive citizens.'”