This is one reason Donald Trump always seems to be in a bad mood. Perhaps he realizes that the America of his dreams is out of reach.
No matter how many immigrants he deports or prevents from entering the country, the white paradise he promises at the MAGA base, free of Somalis, Mexican “rapists” and generally people from “shithole countries” with shades similar to the America he was born in, is not what he will deliver.
However, he can do a lot of damage. Although he is doing his best to make America intolerable to foreigners and, more generally, to people of ethnicities who do not fit his vision of the American family, Trump is not going to make America great again. He is ensuring that America will become smaller, older, weaker, and easier to push through.
Cutting immigration to zero won’t be enough to restore the American past that President Trump so desperately desires. No matter what he does to eliminate immigrants, the non-Hispanic white footprint continues to shrink.
Trump is not the first politician to try to protect beliefs about America’s white racial stock from “foreign” contamination. The national origin immigration quotas of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were very successful in doing this. In 1960, 75% of immigrants to the United States came from Europe.
But the embankment broke. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 replaced national origins with family ties. These days, only about 10% of immigrants come from Europe. More than half are from Latin America. When Trump was 4 years old, white people made up 9 out of 10 Americans (the census didn’t ask about Hispanic ethnicity). By 2024, the share of non-Hispanic whites had fallen to 57.5%.
No matter what President Trump does to stop immigration, he cannot change this trajectory. Either way, the non-Hispanic white population will continue to decline, with the Census Bureau projecting a decline of 3.6 million people over the next five years, about 11 million in the next 10 years, and more than 14 million in the decade after that.
And that means the U.S. population will decline fairly sharply if Trump and his ethno-nationalist sidekick Stephen Miller achieve their goal of cutting future immigration to zero. It will shrink by 6% by mid-century, 10% by 2060, and by a third by 2100. The president may not fully understand this, but his understanding of economics has proven tenuous, and shrinking the population will come at a heavy cost.
The population is not just declining. The working-age population will decline even more rapidly, resulting in an aging population. People over 65 years old now make up about one-fifth of the population. In a zero-immigration scenario, their share would rise to a quarter by mid-century and more than a third by the end of the century, supported by a shrinking labor force.
Data is a hot topic at the White House. But their prescriptions, like any dream, are unrealistic. In other words, the idea is to increase America’s birth rate. The U.S. birth rate has been declining for the past two decades, and currently stands at 1.6 children per woman of reproductive age, well below the replacement rate of approximately 2.1 children needed to stabilize the population.
Part of the problem is that declining birth rates are a global phenomenon that scholars don’t fully understand. This is happening not only in wealthy middle-income countries, but also in the world’s poorest countries, where birth rates are relatively high. Fertility policies in developed countries, including child benefits, widespread provision of childcare, and other family supports, have had a limited impact on families’ propensity to have children.
Another problem is that the solutions proposed by the Trump administration are ridiculous. These include the National Motherhood Medal for particularly prolific mothers, fertility tracking classes, and $1,000 in a Trump account for babies born during the president’s term. They come amid a flurry of policies that make childbirth more difficult, including cuts to federal support for child health care and nutrition in the president’s tax cut bill.
Trump’s problem, in a nutshell, is that the only direct policy approach to alleviating America’s demographic challenges is to rely on the people for whom he has expressed unbridled hatred: nonwhite immigrants.
Under the Census Bureau’s immigration growth scenario (net immigration averages about 1.5 million people per year), the U.S. population would grow by 13% by 2050 and 28% by the end of the century. It will not be until 2070 that the proportion of people aged 65 and over will reach one in four.
One challenge to this scenario is that there may not be enough immigrants to continue supporting the U.S. population, especially as birth rates are declining in Latin America and Asia as well. Net immigration to the United States averaged 1.8 million annually from 2020 to 2024, due to a surge following the coronavirus pandemic. However, in the previous 10 years, the number was only around 900,000 per year.
But the president’s bigger challenge is something else. The pure non-Hispanic white population will shrink under any scenario. But high immigration would accelerate the population decline, from 58% of the population this year to less than 47% in 2050. The share of Hispanics will rise from just under 20% to nearly 26%.
The challenge is sure to make this man suffer. If Trump wants to keep America great, he has to make America brown.
