No, "We" Aren't Being Replaced by Immigrants
Biden's policies have been more immigrant-friendly than Trump - but have not driven that much new immigration by historic standards
Biden is at the center of a wicked conspiracy to flood the nation with new immigrants to replace whites - while “poisoning the blood of the nation” in Trump’s Nazi-like rhetoric. Or as some on the left argue, Biden has just adopted Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, with little daylight between their approaches.
The reality is far less dramatic than either story. Biden’s policies are significantly more favorable to immigrants than Trump’s - the right is not wrong on that - but the number of immigrants migrating to the U.S. annually is largely in line with most years since 2000 under the Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama administrations.
And as this graphic reflects (based on data from a Brookings report out this month), net immigration each year is now a bit over 1 million per year and far less than annual births, so the nation is in little danger -- if you want to be a racist and call it a danger — of immigration outpacing American parental fecundity.
Our current level of immigration, with roughly 15% of the population being foreign-born, is at the level of immigration the nation had from the Civil War until anti-immigrant racism slammed our border shut in the 1920s. (see below from a Migration Policy Institute brief.)
The forty years of reduced immigration, starting with the anti-immigrant 1920s laws and lasting until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, was the aberration and the present period just matches the historical norm.
While the total number of immigrants has increased significantly year-by-year, the foreign-born percentage has increased far more slowly- and has done so only because we were starting from the extremely low base at its nadir in the 1960s.
As to undocumented immigrants, the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the undocumented population has grown by just 2.5 million under Biden, which is significantly less than a single year of domestic births. Legal immigrants still make up three-fourths of the foreign-born population in the US.
The real problem we face is the hyperbolic political doomsaying on the issue. Media hype and partisan propaganda mean American voters have a completely distorted view of how big the foreign-born population is, as a 2022 YouGov survey confirmed. Americans believe that one-third (33%) of our population was born in another country, more than double the accurate percentage.
Then again, Americans overall believe 27% of the population are Muslims, 30% are Jews, 39% are Hispanic, 27% are Native American and 29% are Asian – so it’s no surprise the 1% of white Christians left over are holed up in their bunkers, particularly based on the propaganda fed to them on Fox News and rightwing social media.
If there was mass unemployment, worries about immigration might have some basis in a fight over scarce jobs. But the raw racism of the current anti-immigrant attacks is nowhere clearer than that it is happening in the middle of nearly full employment and job shortages in numerous sectors. But then, as the perception data above reflects, this is a battle based on political fables being told by politicians, and recycled through the media, not a fight reflecting any concrete needs of voters.
Side note: Is immigration “unnatural” population growth?
In the original Brookings paper cited above, the author makes the odd rhetorical move of comparing immigration growth to a “natural increase” in population, which is a creepy linguistic distinction. This may be a technical demographic term of art but technical language can carry its own ideology
The ideological distortion is made even creepier by Brookings subtracting deaths from births to define that “natural increase,” thereby making the immigration population increase seem larger by comparison in graphs like this.
The full source data is below, with births and deaths separated, which tells a different story (ie. the graphic at the beginning of this article). If net immigration is exceeding this technocratically defined “natural increase” in population, it is due less to the dropoff in births and far more to the growing number of annual deaths in an aging population.
Now, we could cut back on immigration to compensate, but if anything the demand for more labor to provide caregiving for that aging population is likely only to grow, making more immigration, not less, the real need- and a very “natural” response to that demographic need.