I told you so!

I wasn't surprised one bit with the news report about the continuing decline in the fertility rate here in the US. 

I strongly disagree with the second part of the title of the opinion essay: "there are no easy solutions to fix it."

Yes, there are easy solutions.

The easiest of them all?  Encourage immigration.

But, immigration is not mentioned in that essay, which is all focused on childcare expenses and Build Back Better.

Almost four years ago, on December 7, 2017, the newspaper where I was a regular columnist for years, published one of my last columns.  In that essay, I wrote about the decreasing fertility rate and how immigration can quickly and easily address that issue.

Because there is no longer a hyperlink to that column, I have copied/pasted below the version that I emailed to the editor.

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We are rightfully preoccupied with the political theatre in Washington, DC, especially with President Donald Trump’s tweets, and the ongoing developments in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s Russia connections.

This also means that we are not paying attention to a number of other issues that will affect the country over the long term, and for which we will need to develop constructive public policies.

One of the trend lines that does not make the headlines is the falling fertility rate in the US. If we do not worry about this now, it will become too late to do anything in the future.

The total fertility rate is the average number of children born to women in a society during their childbearing years. Adjusting for various factors, like kids who might not live to become adults or parents, demographers have presented us with an understanding that the fertility rate has to be about 2.1 children per woman in order for the population to be stable.

Fertility rates higher than 2.1 explain population growth that we see in countries like Nigeria. On the other hand, countries like Japan and Italy are on a path of population decrease because the fertility rates there are significantly below 2.1. In Japan it is 1.46 children per woman and, therefore, the population there is projected to shrink by a third in fifty years. If those trends continue, Japan will have less than half of its current population in a hundred years from now.

Here in the United States, we talk so much about “baby boomers” that we have completely overlooked the fact that we are going through a baby bust. Fertility rates in the US have been staying below that magical 2.1 children per woman. The latest data show that fertility rate has dropped to 1.77 children per woman.

This decrease is not really a surprise. After all, most other economically advanced countries have already experienced such a decline in fertility. 

The surprise is that the US has been a contrast to Europe and Japan for so long, and is only now showing signs of joining them.

There is, of course, an important reason why the US has been different from Europe and Japan in terms of fertility rates. It is related to a huge public policy issue—immigration.

As reported by the Pew Research Center, “were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970.” 

While immigrants accounted for only one in seven Americans in 2015, a quarter of all the births in America were to immigrant women. “Births to women from Mexico, China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico accounted for 58% of all births to immigrant mothers in the U.S. in 2014.” Even here in Oregon, births to immigrant mothers have offset what would have otherwise been a decrease in births from 1990 to 2015.

In fact, we need to look no further than the White House for these trends. Of the five children that President Trump has, only one was born to his second wife who is from the US, while the other four are the children of immigrant women he married—Melania and Ivana, who respectively immigrated from Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

The facts are clear: Without immigrants, the US too would exhibit the low fertility rates of Europe or Japan.

It has become fashionable, and a politically winning formula, to beat up on immigrants. However, the nativists might not be aware, or perhaps they refuse to acknowledge, that without immigrants and their children, the US population will not grow, but will decrease. As a result, like Japan, we too will be trapped with a stagnant economy.

The question, therefore, is “so what?”

The research is also very clear that it is not easy to provide incentives to American women to have more kids. Fertility rates are dropping because women, and men too, are intentionally making those choices. People prefer to invest in education and to lead comfortable lives in leisure. Such preferences mean that they choose to have fewer children.

As any parent knows, having children is expensive. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates the average cost of raising a child till adulthood to be about $233,610. USDA notes that housing, food, and childcare account for almost two-thirds of those expenses. If we want women to have more children, then it is clear that higher fertility will not happen unless the American people are willing to pay for those expenses. It is highly unlikely that we will subsidize fertility at such high levels.

The answer to “so what?” is, therefore, obvious and staring at us: Encourage immigration for continued growth and prosperity in the United States, despite the farcical theatre in DC.