Op-ed: Immigration Cannot Solve the Fertility Crisis

With the federal government having long treated birthright citizenship as a requirement of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, President Trump’s executive order denying it to children of noncitizen, non-permanent resident mothers faces an uphill court battle. Still, opponents of birthright citizenship can hope that the result will elucidate Section 1’s much-debated “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase and clarify whether an amendment is necessary to reinterpret it.

This issue is not trivial. My colleagues and I at the Center for Immigration Studies recently put together a preliminary estimate that illegal immigrant mothers gave birth to between 225,000 and 250,000 babies in 2023. That number is larger than the total number of births in any single state in 2023 except Texas and California. All of these children are automatically U.S. citizens, and through their birth they increase their parents’ chances of remaining in the country as well.

With the U.S.’s sub-replacement level fertility, isn’t having more children exactly what our country needs? “I want more babies in the United States of America,” Vice President J.D. Vance recently declared, and with good reason. Deaths will soon outnumber births in the U.S., bringing the risk of economic and cultural stagnation as our population ages.

Why not embrace so-called “anchor babies” as well as legal immigrants who boost the nation’s fertility rate? Put another way, if having children is increasingly a “job that Americans won’t do,” why not bring in people who will?

A low national fertility rate is indeed a problem—but immigration is not the solution.

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[Read the rest at The American Mind]