Displacement Panic

American Girl

Birthrates are way below "replacement."

There are more brown people. More women in charge. More newcomers. And plain old regular white Americans are disappearing. 

Some people are panicking over the change. It is part of what elected Donald Trump.  

To maintain population, the average woman needs to bear 2.1 children, or 2,100 children for every 1,000 women. The US birthrate fell for the fourth consecutive year, and is the lowest level in 32 years. This year the National Center for Health Statistics reports that there were 1,728 births per 1,000 women of fertility age 15-44. Click: CDC, Division of Vital Statistics

Birthrates in developed countries had fallen below replacement rates some time ago. Women in Italy and France and Germany and Japan had stopped having enough children to maintain population. The US caught up with the trend. The big picture of developed countries is that women, when they can make choices on their own, when they can have careers, and when they have access to contraception, choose to limit the number of children they have.

Teen age pregnancy is down, widely understood to be a good trend. Pregnancy for women late in their fertility cycle is up, slightly, and this gets celebrity news coverage and anecdotal notice. Women age 40-54 had a 3% rise in births, but the actual numbers are small, about 127,000 lat year, compared with 124,000 the year before, but this is dwarfed by the births that take place by women age 20-35: 2,900,000 of them.

Women in that prime fertility range are delaying pregnancies. Women age 20-24 had 725,000 babies. Women age 30-34 had 1,100,000.

Some of this is situational, for the time, the economy, and American policies that make it easier to be a senior than a young adult. The Great Recession made precarious the career paths of young people. Home affordability is an issue. Student debt is an issue.  A college graduate with a job in 1980 might consider himself ready to be married, buy a house and support a family.  It is different now. 

Farm Girl

Intersectionaly. The word is in common use now, relating to the overlapping cause and effect of ethnicity, gender, and prejudice. For example, a black woman is at the intersection of multiple problems.

There is another arena of intersection: immigration, college affordability and debt, Fed policy to re-inflate asset prices, health care for seniors in Medicare but not for young working adults. 

Not surprising in a democracy, the political system is sensitive to the concerns of those who turn out to vote, seniors. Young people don't turn out to vote. The result is a suite of policies that have tuitions high, debts not dischargeable in bankruptcy, wages low in relation to home prices, little protection for income maintenance for maternity leave, expensive child care, and reduced support for K-12 schools. 

We make it hard for young people. They respond by delaying or avoiding parenting. Intersection.

The result is that there is a giant economic draw for immigrants to fill a demographic hollow, which has the effect of changing the demographics of the country, which causes the incumbent white population to be open to anti-immigration "great again" anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-Central American, anti-Asian talk. 

Voters were responding to something objectively real that is happening in America: fewer children of native born Americans, and more immigrants who seem "other" in some manner. Americans are less frequently the children and grandchildren of current Americans. They are immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Click.

Racial/ethnic anxiety was highly correlated with Trump support. Voters who consider immigration too much, too fast, and too uncontrolled overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Many Americans had a sense of "white vulnerability."  Click.

Most people in the urban coastal metropolises are OK with that. There is a big constituency for diversity and talk of rainbows and multicultural tapestries. 

But it is far from universal. Some people resent the changes underway. They vote, too.