The United States needs more migrants to replace the children that Americans are not producing, former President Bill Clinton said at a press event on Sunday.
“America is not having enough babies to keep our populations up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work,” Clinton said at a fish fry in Fort Valley, Georgia.
He repeated the claim at another campaign stop on October 14, saying, “We got the lowest birth rate we’ve had in well over 100 years. We’re not at replacement level, which means we got to have somebody come here if we want to keep growing the economy.”
However, mass migration into the United States makes it difficult for Americans to have enough babies because it drives down family wages, pushes up housing prices, and distracts national leaders from delivering policies that help Americans have more babies.
Clinton’s comment came as he tried to excuse the inflow of migrants, despite the inevitability that some migrants murder Americans, such as Laken Riley, a young, unmarried woman in Georgia.
Under President Joe Biden’s easy-migration policies, wages have been flat and housing prices have jumped by roughly 20 percent as he welcomed around 10 million legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants into the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. birth rate fell to a record low in 2023, according to an August report by CNN:
In 2023, the US fertility rate fell another 3% from the year before, to a historic low of about 55 births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to final data published Tuesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Just under 3.6 million babies were born last year, about 68,000 fewer than the year before.
Since 2007, when the fertility rate was at its most recent high, the number of births has declined 17%, and the general fertility rate has declined 21%, according to the new report.
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A “package of demographic changes” – people getting married later and less often, spending more years in school and taking longer to get economically established in a steady job, to name a few – align with birth rate trends, said [Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at The Ohio State University].
“When the cost of housing rises, fertility falls … certainly that’s not really something that’s even necessarily debated anymore because it is so obviously the case,” demographer Lyman Stone told Breitbart News in November 2023.
The government could raise the Americans’ birth rate if it raised productivity by cutting migration.
Clinton admitted the productivity alternative on Monday by saying “we’ve got to have somebody come here if we want to grow the economy unless one of you artificial intelligence geniuses has figured out how we can all grow with no work.”
But Clinton’s preference for migrants over American childbirths is the norm within the Democratic Party, mostly because the party is dominated by the alliance of pro-migration progressives who dislike borders and investors who gain from an inflow of cheap workers, government-funded consumers, and apartment-sharing renters.
In November 2022, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) subordinated American families to the welfare of migrants:
We’re short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them — because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers [illegals who were brought in by their parents] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million — or however many undocumented there are here [Emphasis added].
The same replacement pattern — more migration reduces native births — is found in multiple developed countries.
For example, the two establishment parties in the U.K. are importing record numbers of migrants into the United Kingdom, ensuring a steep fall in child births. In February, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reported:
Amid Justin Trudeau’s record-breaking migration in Canada, CBC reported in September:Campaigners have warned that “procreation has become a luxury item”, after it emerged that the fertility rate in England and Wales had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1939.
Official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed “total fertility”, calculated based on the birthrate across different age groups, fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022.
That is well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population without significant immigration. In total, there were 605,479 live births in 2022, according to the ONS, down 3.1% from a year earlier, and the lowest number since 2002.
Canada recorded its lowest ever fertility rate for the second year in a row in 2023, according to Statistics Canada.
The country recorded a rate of 1.26 children born per woman, according to the agency, with British Columbia having the nation’s lowest fertility rate at one child per woman.
Americans want more children, according to surveys.
“We can see that every single estimate of ideal or desired fertility, including our hardcore minimum estimate from adjusted GSS data, is way above actual fertility,” a 2018 report by the Institute for Family Studies said. The report added:
What this comparison makes clear is that no matter whether you use intended or ideal fertility, women report greater childbearing ambitions than they have achieved or are likely to achieve, and this has been the case for a long time. Cut the data however you like, use whatever indicator floats your boat, and you’ll find the ship of American fertility sinking, steadily underperforming what women have been saying they want or intend.
Longer hours, lower wages, less consistent employment, high childcare costs, poor access to credit, burdensome loans, all-too-few good husband candidates — take your pick of the problem — a growing number of women are simply lowering their expectations for their own family lives, even as they continue to believe that something like 2.3 kids would be ideal for them [emphasis added].
Clinton had one child with his wife, Hillary Clinton.
