The US birthrate falls further below replacement level. But it’s okay, because immigration!
The number of women in the United States who gave birth dropped last year, according to federal statistics released Thursday, extending the decline for a sixth year. The National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012, but 9 percent below the high in 2007.
According to the report, the general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies, well below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. For every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, there were 62.5 births in 2013, compared with 63 the previous year.
The decline is especially notable because the number of women in their prime childbearing years, 20 to 39, has been growing since 2007. Some demographers said the numbers were not cause for concern.
“Americans haven’t worried much about birthrates in the past, because we
have the faucet of immigration to turn on and off,” said Andrew J.
Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University.
Absolutely. After all, swapping an -1SD IQ Guatamalan immigrant who doesn’t speak English for the native child of +2 SD white parents isn’t dysgenic or dyscivic at all, right? Such an exchange is not going to have any problematic long-term consequences in a world that we’re told is going to be getting more competitive and require more cognitive capacity to be economically productive in the future, n’est-ce pas?
It looks rather like a vicious cycle has been established. The economy drives down birth rates, which results in less educable lower-IQ immigrants being substituted for higher educated, higher-IQ natives, which hurts the economy….