Immigration kills birthrates

You can't populate Mars with pensioners

Editors note: populating Mars is not a personal priority (though I would watch on with great interest), nor is artificially meddling with our populations in an attempt to engineer higher birthrates out of them. What I am concerned about, however, is the inverse of this: avoiding the imposition of artificial circumstances upon our young which erodes their ability to have children.

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There are no free lunches when solving existential societal problems.

There are many issues which preclude mass immigration being the solution to declining populations in the West. Some are obvious, some are subtle. Here I wish to focus on one in particular: that immigration actually accelerates the trend which it is implemented to solve. Immigration kills family formation and birthrates.

This article is intended to be as ‘objective’ (to the extent that such a thing exists) as possible. I do not necessarily wish that this reality was the case. This is also not intended as a judgement on any race or individual, but is merely the observation of higher-order effects of changes in the constitution of large societies.

Collapsing fertility is clearly a major issue for our own societies, both because essential services will begin to fail as the ratio of dependent elderly to working young grows, but also because it is indicative of a broader disfunction: the majority of young people state that they want children but are, for one reason or another, unable to have them. This should be addressed.

Aaron Siskind, ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #474’ (1954)

Populating Mars - and the stars more generally - will require a huge and rapidly growing population. This will have to be achieved in the context of an alien planet, artificial habitation, and tremendous environmental pressure. To achieve such an ambition, we must therefore be ruthless in our analysis of what sustains birthrates. It should be noted that our societies are currently a very, very long way from such fecundity. Something must change.

The first study I wish to draw attention to (credit to

Jonathan Keeperman

for promoting it on X) is "E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates" by Gurun, Umit G., and David H. Solomon.

From the abstract:

In the United States, local measures of racial and ethnic diversity are robustly associated with lower birth rates. A one standard deviation decrease in racial concentration (having people of many different races nearby) or increase in racial isolation (being from a numerically smaller race in that area) is associated with 0.064 and 0.044 fewer children, respectively, after controlling for many other drivers of birth rates… This pattern holds for many racial groups, is present in different vintages of the US census data (including before the Civil War), and holds internationally… The rise in racial diversity in the US since 1970 explains between 20% and 44% of the decline in birth rates during that period, depending on methodology.

One thing immediately stands out: the effect of the diversity of an individual’s surroundings on that particular individual’s fertility is small. Thus one should not dismiss these findings on the instinctive reaction ‘I barely care about diversity and can’t see how it would affect my family decisions’. However, when huge numbers of people are exposed to these effects over a long period of time, the cumulative effects emerge as massive.

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To get obvious objections out of the way up front, they control aggressively for confounding variables.

We present evidence that birth rates are robustly lower in areas of greater local racial and ethnic diversity, after controlling for a wide array of potential confounding variables…

We control explicitly for demographics (education, income, citizenship, employment, marital status), demographics interacted with state and year fixed effects, local area attributes (population, college fraction, income, fraction recently moved to the area, employment, age), and local area attributes interacted with year fixed effects. The effect is large and highly significant in every specification.

They also observe that the effect is present across US history, even before the Civil War, and is thus difficult to explain by (even radical) changes in race relations and national conception.

The authors identify two causal mechanisms. The first is simple and intuitive (although I am sure it will be controversial to some). This is simply the observation that the overwhelming majority of people of all ethnicities have a preference to pair-bond within their own ethnicity (‘homophily’), and diversity makes this more challenging.

This isn’t a new observation, and given the preponderance of evidence, the existence of this mechanism is difficult to dispute. Take, for example, the revealed preferences of the users that OK Cupid famously published.

One can see that across all racial groups - women, in particular, are far more likely to respond to messages from men of the same race as themselves. (Interestingly, while I was fetching the above images, I noticed that a 2014 HuffPost article actually identified the same causal mechanism as the study authors, saying “If you're a black man or woman or Asian man, you're going to have a tougher time getting a date on OKCupid.”)

OKCupid revealed rating preferences in 2009 & 2014

As as second cause, the authors identify a decline in social trust and greater individual isolation in areas with high levels of diversity. They cite Robert Putnam to explain this effect. For our purposes it is easier to directly cover Putnam’s work here. His most significant work on the subject is “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”.

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration… immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.

This is a large and nuanced study, but for our purposes there’s a key factor at play: diversity erodes the integrity of many forms of social networks, and social networks are the bedrock of relationship formation.

…social networks have value… In the language of economics, social networks often have powerful externalities. Social capital comes in many forms, not all fungible. Not all networks have exactly the same effects: friends may improve health, whereas civic groups strengthen democracy.

Putnam famously detailed in his earlier work ‘Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community’ the astonishing collapse of American social institutions since the 1950s, when social involvement was so energetic that it would shock us today.

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Putnam rejects the dichotomy between the traditional competing diversity arguments:

1. That diversity fosters inter-group cohesion and understanding - ie. a ‘coming together’; or

2. That diversity fosters inter-group animus but in-group solidarity - ie. an ‘us vs. them’ mentality.

Instead, Putnam finds that diversity erodes both inter-group and in-group bonds.

We asked every respondent how much he or she trusted whites, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics (or Latinos), and we know the respondent’s own ethnicity, so this measure is simply the average trust expressed toward the other three ethnic categories… Inter-racial trust is relatively high in homogeneous South Dakota and relatively low in heterogeneous San Francisco or Los Angeles. The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them.

Now we ask about trust in people of the respondent’s own race: how much do whites trust other whites, blacks other blacks, Hispanics other Hispanics, and Asians other Asians? This figure charts an entirely unexpected correlation for it shows that in-group trust, too, is lower in more diverse settings… In other words, in more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.

This in turn explains the suppression of birth rates by interrupting essential social relations:

Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.

Effects include:

• Fewer close friends and confidants.
• Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
• More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment’.

Again, Putnam controls for age, affluence, citizenship, ethnicity, language, education, home ownership, gender, density, income inequality, and so forth.

The effect survives focus on the specific groups in tech (young, wealthy, urban), so it is not good enough to reassure ourselves that the next global generation will be more progressive and immune to these effects. “In short, we have tried to test every conceivable artifactual explanation for our core finding, and yet the pattern persists. Many Americans today are uncomfortable with diversity.”

As society pulls in on itself, fewer of our young find love and express that love in children.

(There’s also a second-order consequence of pulling high-IQ workers from high-fertility areas to low-fertility areas like tech hubs which also kills our ability to colonize Mars: you reduce the rate at which the most intelligent members of our planet reproduce. This is the so-called ‘IQ shredder’ effect, and will be the subject of my next examination.)

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I hope you’re enjoying this brief series on global fertility. This is a specialist subject which I know is primarily interesting to a subset of my audience. If not - fear not! We will return to more traditional ‘Becoming Noble’ topics shortly. I’m just processing my thoughts on the great H-1B debate.

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please do leave a like below, and consider supporting this publication.

Sic transit imperium,

Johann