Immigrants Fix The Birth Crisis
To the Editor:
The Heritage Foundation’s report entitled “Fertility in the United States Is Below Replacement” dated March 4, 2025 stated: “The total fertility rate in the U.S. has been below replacement for the past half-century. Childbearing in the U.S. transitioned to later in life and women are having fewer children. Decades of declining and sub-replacement fertility has caused the U.S. population to age. The total fertility rate is below replacement even after adjusting for the timing in births, an indication that women are unlikely to have the number of children that will result in population replacement. The fertility rate in the U.S. is not predicted to rise above replacement. Even so, the U.S. population is not expected to decline before 2100. But without a return to above replacement fertility, the U.S. will be dependent on immigration to prevent population contraction.”
We already depend on undocumented workers to run our economy. The Center for Migration Policy estimates that 74.1% of illegal immigrants work. “The major occupations of employment were services in which 25.5% of unauthorized immigrants were employed; maintenance at 24.8%; management, business, science, and arts at 19.1%; production, transportation, and material moving at 18.3%; and sales and office occupations at 11.3%.”
According to the George W. Bush Institute, some of the side effects of a declining population include:
• Labor will become scarce.
• The economy will grow more slowly.
• Resources will be diverted to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics, but only 12% of American jobs can be automated.
• Occupations that are hardest to automate include healthcare, education, caregiving, and policing (approximately 30% of jobs.)
•Another 16% of jobs, such as sales, customer service, and logistics, will be challenging to automate.
• Excess infrastructure, such as schools and universities, will abound.
The Trump Administration is so concerned that they are giving each child born a onetime $1,000 payment after a baby is born in the Big Beautiful Bill. The amount that will be spent is unknown, however there are around 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. every year and the program runs from January 1, 2025, through December 31, 2028. The money cannot be spent until the recipient turns eighteen.
However, the Heritage Foundation has pointed out that South Korea and Hungary, which also have low birth rates, have attempted to throw money at the problem of low birthrates by providing subsidies to families with children, to no avail.
Rather than trying to fix our immigration system, we are busy rounding up illegal immigrants. We have allocated $165 billion in appropriations in the Big Beautiful Bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens to make America Safe again, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
To fill deportation quotas, we have gone past the criminal illegal aliens and are detaining many with little or no criminal history, except for having crossed the border without permission. Please search the internet for stories of illegal immigrants such as Ward Sakeik, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate and business owner with no offenses other than overstaying a tourist visa when she was eight years old. Sakeik was detained returning from her honeymoon.
Allowing individuals such as Sakeik, who are vital to our economy, a pathway to citizenship makes economic sense and is certainly cheaper than sending them to Sudan or housing them in Alligator Alcatraz. Besides, it’s the right thing to do.
Marie W. Watts Muldoon