Trump Can't Both Deport Millions and Increase the Population

Our current leadership tells us that the US has millions of people it needs to forcibly eject. At the same time, our leaders are on record with their concern about our dangerously low birth rates. They say we’ll be in trouble if we don’t have enough workers to sustain our society in the future. These twin but opposite claims lie at the heart of so many of the Trump regime’s policy motions. But no serious person believes it’s possible to both decrease and increase the US population at the same time. 

I’m an anthropologist who’s spent 17 years studying marriage and family formation in Japan, which has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. My research has largely focused on contemporary matchmakers in order to understand why people don’t get married and what might convince them to, in a bid to keep birth rates from falling further. As a result, I know a few things about what does and doesn’t influence birth rates. As a bonus, I now have a child in addition to my cats, so according to Vance, I am entitled to speak on issues of civic import.

It’s hard to do research on birth rates without becoming keenly aware that they are not the only way to grow a population. Just as it has some of the lowest birth rates, Japan has incredibly low immigration rates. According to the OECD, while immigration has soared in recent years, immigrants still make up just 2.3% of its population, the third lowest among OECD countries, and are only 2.6% of its workers. Analysts have been warning for years that Japan is going to have to dramatically relax its immigration policies if its birth rates don’t improve, in addition to more effectively supporting immigrants once they arrive. Slowly, bit by bit, it seems like they are. But Japan was just one of the first countries to experience the demographic shifts that are now being discussed worldwide, and what’s true there is often true elsewhere, including the US.

Despite this, the US government is trying to kick people out, on the grounds that immigrants both with and without documentation are driving crime and terrorism. (In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.) Trump promised the American people deportations, and he’s working hard to deliver. In addition to working on speeding up his pace and power to deport undocumented immigrants, the most shocking thing he’s done recently is arrest a green card holder for the apparent crime of having led Columbia’s fiery pro-Palestinian protests against Israeli military action last year. 

Green card holders are supposed to be the good immigrants that the right always claims to support: the ones who followed the rules. Freedom of expression and assembly are constitutionally guaranteed rights. And yet, if Trump has his way, legal immigration status will no longer be an impediment to deportation. 

The Trump administration also wants to eliminate birthright citizenship, which means that native-born US citizens whose parents are recent immigrants may also face deportation. Naturalized citizens may not be safe either under a government that doesn’t recognize immigrant rights in general or differentiates between immigration statuses. But most straightforwardly, eliminating birthright citizenship would automatically reduce the number of citizens who are automatically entitled to live and work in the US.

I find Mahmoud Khalil’s case particularly striking at this moment given that he has just recently become a father. His wife is an American citizen and so their child will (for now) be a US citizen, even if birthright citizenship is revoked. They are contributing to society in this most fundamental way. Trump’s vice-president JD Vance spent much of his campaign railing against the childless, like the time that he claimed that women who miss their biological window to have kids are miserable people with no value system. 

Likewise, American functional co-president Elon Musk is famous for his pronatalist beliefs and the many children he has produced to support those beliefs (although not necessarily the children). Although mass layoffs of government employees and brutal treatment of immigrants have received more attention, the Trump regime is also putting weird birth rate policies into effect, such as limiting how much funding different locations receive from the Department of Transportation, based on their birth and marriage rates. And it could be argued that the push to end birthright citizenship is another policy aimed at manipulating birth rates—making it unsafe for immigrants to have children here.

Japanese and American politicians both scold childless women for being selfish, but that doesn’t work. Pronatalist politicians, including Vance and Elon Musk, have it backwards. It’s not that people are selfish, lack values, or don’t care about the future. It’s that when the world makes it hard to imagine a future with kids, many people just don’t have them. 

When surveyed, Japanese singles are clear about why they’re reluctant to get married or have as many children as they want: they don’t have time or money. This was also very clear in matchmakers’ approaches—they talked to their clients about incomes and assets (like houses) a lot. A more expensive solution is giving people money, which does raise birth rates, especially when those funds are unconditional. But since most social spending tends to pay long-term dividends rather than cause debt, even fiscal conservatives should not be afraid of it.

This shouldn’t be very controversial. In the US, the Child Tax Credit means parents pay lower taxes. Additionally, there’s evidence that a cash grant program in Alaska, which simply gives everyone money, boosts fertility. A universal income scheme like this relieves economic stress for everyone, so people who don’t have kids yet get some breathing room to imagine a future where they do.

Other countries—including Japan—offer lump sums when children are conceived or born. Many offer monthly or yearly child care stipends. Still other policies offer money indirectly by making it easier for parents to work by mandating flexible work hours or paid parental leave. It’s easier to decide to have kids if you feel confident you can manage life with them in it.

Some scholars have pointed out that none of these policies have returned birth rates to the replacement rate. (Vox has an excellent summary) This is true, but at the same time, the US unique among its peers in that it doesn’t have any explicit national fertility plans! In fact, apart from the Child Tax Credit, most US policy actively prevents people from having the resources to have children. The US is the only low-fertility country with no parental leave policy that gives new parents job security or pay. 

Moreover, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” slashes the federal workforce with dubious legality to decrease governmental spending, we’re unlikely to see the US adopt any of the tactics discussed above that have elevated or staved off severely low birth rates elsewhere. DOGE is unlikely to care that money invested in social programs usually pays dividends over time, resulting in a wealthier, healthier populace. 

The only thing the US has done to raise birth rates is make it possible for states to ban abortion. This does in fact raise birth rates. It also increases infant mortality by forcing non-viable pregnancies to go to term, and making it harder to provide adequate health care to both parents and infants. It’s not really a winning strategy if more people is actually the goal.

So far, Trump’s administration seems to be prioritizing cruelty against migrants over reproductive cruelty, seeing fit to leave the latter to red state governments for now. But neither of these cruelties will boost the US population or lower crime. And if a larger population is a real policy objective, then the US government needs to reverse course on both abortion and migration issues, as well as adopting measures that have proven effective in raising birth rates elsewhere. 

Since that’s not what’s happening, it’s clear Trump, Musk, Vance, and friends don’t want more people. Around the world, pronatalist policies tend to go hand-in-hand with ideas about racial supremacy and national purity. If the only good people are your people, then pushing pregnancy really is the only way to increase the population. Ironically, even if the current regime can achieve this terrible goal, it’ll be a pyrrhic victory, costing countless lives along with US economic stability. Even the most conservative among us, if they truly value stability, family, or life, need to oppose these policies as if our whole future depends on it. It does.

Featured image is Immigrant Children at Ellis Island, by Brown Brothers