A favorite trick of politicians is to appeal to the emotions of voters rather than the minds of voters. Politicos know that the moment that an emotional reaction starts is the same moment that logical thinking stops. This is why the phrase 'hot button' exists. When a voter's 'hot button' is pressed, his heart is activated and his brain is deactivated.
Once this phenomenon has been recognized, it's amusing to watch almost any televised interview with a politician and wait for the exact moment that the 'hot button' is pressed. This allows the viewer to avoid the trick of a politician using an appeal to emotion to override the deeper and more enduring appeal of logic.
One new trick of politicians is to use the distaste that voters have for 'racism' to prevent them from using reason to uncover the true causes and effects of current policies. 'Replacement theory' is the concept that elites are using non-white immigrants to replace mostly white citizens of Western countries. This is generally labeled as a 'conspiracy theory' by the left and is used to denounce all opposition to unlimited immigration as 'racist'. Most voters recoil from racism, and will oppose anything labeled as racist as soon as that 'hot button' is pressed.
'Replacement theory' is wrong, but not for the reason that the left offers as an explanation for why it is wrong. It is unfettered corporate greed, rather than a preference for any particular skin color, that drives governments to allow massive illegal immigration across their borders.
The total fertility rate is the estimate of the number of children that a woman will have during her lifetime. A total fertility rate of about 2.100 creates 'zero population growth', or a stable number of people in that country, if immigration is factored out of the math. A number slightly greater than 2 is needed to account for deaths that occur before adulthood.
A graph of total fertility rates by ethnicity for Americans in 2020 illustrates these numbers:
Asian 1.385
American Indian/Alaska Native 1.5165
White, non-Hispanic 1.552
Black, non-Hispanic 1.714
Hispanic 1.8755
Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander 2.1415
All 1.641
The total fertility rate is far below what is needed for zero population growth. To understand why this is true, use a calculator to divide (1.641/2.100). The fraction shown, 0.78, is then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage of people in the next generation versus the original generation.
The first succeeding generation is 78% as large as the original population cohort. After that, multiply 0.78 times itself, then hit the '=' key again. The percentages drop to 61%, and then 47%, for the next two generations. There would be less than half as many great-grandchildren as the number of their great-grandparents, if the current rates are projected into the future. This is a quick and simple method to get a reasonable estimate of how the future will look if current trends continue.
Americans are not replacing themselves. It doesn't matter what ethnicity they are, with the borderline exception of Pacific Islanders, who are just above the replacement rate of 2.100. All other racial categories are below replacement value.
The root cause of the depopulation of Americans is a lack of self-replacement by almost all ethnic groups. It’s isn’t just white Americans who are having too few babies, it’s almost all Americans.
Why is this happening?
It simply costs too much to raise children in America. One estimate is that it costs $310,000 to raise a child to age 17, and that does not include college.
By contrast, "... almost half of the world population lives in poverty, unfortunately. They sustain themselves on less than $2.5 per day [sic]. In these places, the average annual cost of raising a child was estimated by UNICEF at around $900. Therefore, a person’s upbringing up to age 17 costs $16,200."
If $310,000 is divided by $16,200 and rounded to a whole number, the result is 19. For the cost of raising one American child, nineteen children can be raised in poorer countries.
For an extremely poor country such as Nigeria, it costs $250 a year to raise a child, or $4250 to pay for a child for 17 years. For the cost of raising one American child, 73 children can be raised in Nigeria.
Multinational corporations are experts in employing workers in low-cost countries to produce goods and services that are exported to high-income countries, and pocketing the difference as their profit margin. “Buy low, sell high” is their favorite strategy. Corporations are also notorious for short-term profit maximizing, even if the eventual total costs to society create a long-term expense that is greater than their profits and results in a net overall loss. The classic example of this is a manufacturer that pollutes so much that the cleanup costs exceed the profits made by that corporation over its entire existence.
Multinational corporations have manipulated governments to allow massive illegal immigration, even when the overwhelming majority of voters do not want any illegal immigration at all. The latest number of illegal border encounters in the southwestern USA in December 2022, the last month before this was written, was 251,487. That's a rate of over three million a year, and it only counts the crossings that were caught by the border patrol. There were no doubt many more that went undetected.
Multinational corporations have effectively outsourced the job of 'Mom' from high-cost nations to low-cost nations. In order to lower their overall costs, they are promoting policies that import low-cost labor to high-income nations, and at the same time they discourage women in high-income nations from bearing children by keeping the costs of child rearing very high. People are the new 'cheap export goods' from poor nations to rich nations, foreign women are the manufacturers of these goods, and domestic production is being shut down as costs are too high to compete with imports.
The same economic incentives that compel multinational corporations to do this are even percolating down to individuals. The 'passport bros' are American men that advocate getting a passport and going to foreign countries to seek love and marriage. The huge disparity between the cost of child rearing in the US versus other nations makes this strategy as economically appealing to individuals as it is to mega-corporations. American women are not amused by this, and they have criticized the passport bros. African women have responded by defending the right of these men to seek love overseas.
When African women are arguing with African American women that African American men should not be criticized for seeking love in Africa, it becomes clear that a "replacement theory" that is favored by "white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and right-wing militias" is not an adequate explanation of the new trends in childbearing that disfavor women in rich nations. Economic incentives provide a better explanation of current reality than a theory “favored by fringe racist groups”.
The mainstream media tries to dismiss any criticism of illegal immigration as a racist reaction. The true reason for the continual tsunami of people illegally crossing borders is that multinational corporations want this to happen in order to increase their profits, and politicos are happy to permit this in exchange for campaign donations.
This is only one example of a broad global trend towards ever-increasing corruption of democratic governments to favor paper people, or incorporated companies, over real flesh-and-blood people. The corruption in the United States has been the focus of this article, but the same thing is happening in Europe and in the rest of the Anglosphere.
In the long run, it is self-defeating for democracies to impoverish their citizens to the point that they can not afford to raise children in their own country. However, the next election is always a higher priority for politicos than the next generation of citizens, because children do not vote.
If voters do not force politicians to fear the wrath of parents more than they covet corporate money, then our maternity wards will gradually empty and there will be fewer and fewer native Americans of all races left to sustain our traditions, and our democracy.