Trump's Racist Plans Will Lead Directly To The Collapse Of The Economy
On Thursdsay, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the U.S. population will begin declining. By the 2030s, reduced fertility and an aging population will result in natural decrease— an excess of deaths relative to births. Immigration will be the biggest driver of population growth
By 2100, the total population in the middle series is projected to reach 366 million compared to the projection for the high-immigration scenario, which puts the population at 435 million. The population for the middle series increases to a peak at 370 million in 2080 and then begins to decline, dropping to 366 million in 2100. The high-immigration scenario increases every year and is projected to reach 435 million by 2100.
The low-immigration scenario is projected to peak at around 346 million in 2043 and decline thereafter, dropping to 319 million in 2100.
Though largely illustrative, the zero-immigration scenario projects that population declines would start in 2024 in the complete absence of foreign-born immigration. The population in this scenario is projected to be 226 million in 2100, roughly 107 million lower than the 2022 estimate.
Historically, declining population has been disastrous for countries for several reasons— a shrinking workforce leads to economic stagnation; a shrinking tax base makes it impossible for government to fund public services; a shrinking consumer base leads to a decline in demand for goods and services (which leads to recession and depression). An aging population puts a strain on healthcare systems and social security just as the number of schools and hospitals and other essential services is declining. Economic competitiveness in the global arena disintegrates. On top of that, conflict and political instability is a sure thing, as social order and security break down and competition for resources increases.
Going back to the Roman Empire, the plague and constant wars caused a decline in population in the 3rd and 4th centuries, leading to economic decline and to the collapse of the empire in the 5th century. Medieval Europe had an even worse time of it. The Black Death caused a decline of between a third and half of Europe population which had a devastating impact on the economy— a society in general. And it took Europe centuries to recover.
In the 17th century Spain had been rocking. Then the plague hit and millions died, just at a time when wars were going badly. The economy nearly collapsed and Spain went from being a preeminent power to an after thought. Britain became the dominant power— until the late 18th and early 19th century when repaid urbanization led to sanitation problems, cholera, smallpox and massive death rates— and millions of people emigrating from Britain to the Americas. Britain turned a lot of this around in the mid-19th century but their day in the sun had been reversed. In the early 2000s, a low fertility rate, an aging population, xenophobia (no immigration) led to a serious decline in Japanese population, as well as social instability and economic decline. South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong (world’s lowest fertility rate) are entering into similar cycles. A decade earlier, the same thing happened in Russia— low birth rate, high mortality rate, low immigration and high emigration. Germany has experienced similar trends but has opened up to immigration to keep the economy humming. Ukraine is an obvious disaster and Bulgaria has the highest population decline in Europe. The Baltic states are experiencing the same kind of thing— low fertility, high emigration, little to no immigration.
There was an interesting guest essay in the NY Times by Anna Sussman, about women not getting married because what a nightmare dating has become! She wrote that a “granular look at what the reality of dating looks and feels like for straight women can go a long way toward explaining why marriage rates are lower than policy scholars would prefer… the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villain… [A] good man is hard to find.”
[W]hat was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data. The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift”— men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health…
Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men. The in-depth interviews, he said, “were even more dispiriting.” For a variety of reasons— mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships— it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully. Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”
Speaking of good men being hard to find… so are good candidates. Trump combines both problems. Yesterday, Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan looked at the immigration agenda he’s offering America, one that would flush the country right down the demographic toilet and one they describe as “as extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025— including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways… He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.”
Did he mention that during the Univision infomercial Jared arranged for him? In 2020, Trump won 38% of Hispanic voters, up simnifically from the 28% he got in 2016. Those Trump gains with Hispanic voters had Republicans optimistic they can pick up congressional seats in Texas next year, along with holding the two South Florida House seats they flipped in 2020. And their optimism was well-placed. They held the two South Florida seats and picked one up in South Texas. According to Pew, 39% of Hispanic voters supported Republicans in the midterms compared to 25% in the 2018.
Savage, Haberman and Swan also noted that Trump plans to “build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized… The constellation of Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.”
[N]umerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.
And Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents— by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.
…Since much of Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.
The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.
DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.
[Nazi advisor Stephen] Miller said Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Trump replaced her with a sixth [fascist], Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.
His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants— pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists— fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.
As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”
Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much farther. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.
… Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.
[Nazi Stephen] Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.
“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”
One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies undocumented immigrants the opportunity to seek asylum hearings and file appeals, which can take months or years— especially when people are not in custody— and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.
…Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”
…More broadly, [Nazi Stephen] Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once… “Bottom line,” he said, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”