Posted on April 19, 2018

Is Diversity Driving Decline in the White Population?

Ilana Mercer, American Renaissance, April 19, 2018

An “aging white population [is] speeding [up] diversity,” blared a headline in The Hill.

Could this be a case of confusing cause-and-effect? Are the two trends — whites dying-out and minorities thriving — really spontaneous and strictly parallel?

The reverse is likely true. Corrected, The Hill headline should have read:

Could speeding up diversity contribute to a decline in the white population?

We learn that “there are growing signs that the rate of change is increasing.” Well of course. America welcomes well over 1 million, mostly non-white, immigrants a year.

If white lives mattered at all to the liberal establishment, an inquiry would ensue:

Is it possibility that an enormous influx of legal and illegal migrants over decades is playing a role in the decline of America’s founding population? (A similar, sad fate was visited on their predecessors, the Amerindians.)

On the one hand, we have the drastic, ongoing decline of America’s white population; on the other, a massive, incessant inpouring of minority immigrants, since 1965. A correlation between the two is not impossible.

A large, well-controlled national survey conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in 2006, found that diversity immiserates and that the historic population is most affected.

Perhaps protracted misery associated with loss of community hastens death?

The logic posits a zero-sum game. The native population has been swamped over time. Resources are scarce — especially when allocated by a wastrel, white-hating Administrative State. In hating on whites, civil society’s institutions are as culpable.

Is it not highly plausible, then, that immigration social engineering, compounded by state policies that privilege non-white newcomers, could contribute to a population decline in white America?

Picture the following scene, set somewhere in what was Trump country, say West Virginia:

A pale patriarch must help his bright son choose a career.

What about pursuing the law?

That’s inadvisable (unless you become an immigration attorney). Law schools routinely reject working-class white males, in favor of students who can show they’ve overcome the right kind of hardship.

Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “Unusual hardship” is a racial cue card for things like having been shot or quitting a gang. As commentator Steve Sailer once noted wryly, “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities.”

What about a degree in engineering? Inadvisable. Forget a knack for invention; for designing and fixing gadgets, inherited from Scottish ancestors. Forget your facility with math and physics. Chances are working-class, pigmentally challenged American lads, circa 2018, will be replaced by the 65,000 H-1B Indian visa recipients, imported annually by America’s technocracy.

I guess you could emulate the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Write a culturally compliant, elitist account of poor, white America. To pass muster with the left literati, “Hillbilly Elegy’s” author generally omits references to the systemic racial demonization and dispossession visited upon poor whites.

Industry magnates and lobbyists are forever countering with studies that employ the “impregnable” science of econometrics to prove that all this globalist activity creates more jobs than it kills. The studies invariably beg the question, as they assume facts not in evidence. In this case, the research assumes the new jobs will be as good as the old (vanished) ones. And that opportunities will be there for all.

To be fruitful and to multiply, people need certain conditions. Good jobs, for one. Prospects for the future, for another.

In the context of migration, consider just how ruthless central planners and their scientists are in “optimizing” and “managing” the natural world.

Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. For example, when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock — it has a complex, highly evolved social structure and bonds — be exterminated because it wasn’t indigenous.

While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained “natural” order — liberal central planners encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re Caucasian. If you’re a rainforest pygmy, liberals will fight for your survival.

Declining birthrates have long been the excuse advanced by immigration central-planners for sticking with mass immigration policies. The aging white population is not replacing itself, say proponents of dooms-day demographics. Young, Third-World immigrants are essential to shore-up the welfare state.

However, the now-waning West became great not because it was more populated than the rest of the world and outbred it. The West was great because of its human capital — innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs to allow its own people to recover.