“First world nations are dying,” Pat Buchanan warned in his 2002 book The Death of the West.
“They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World.”
And what was not — and still is not — happening at home is childbearing. Buchanan was referring to fertility rates, which have been on the decline for decades.
Data released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows U.S. birth rates are dropping to levels of civilizational suicide, with women having on average 1.6 children. According to the CDC data, birth rates dropped for women aged 15-34 between 2023 and 2024 while rising for women aged 40-44. The general fertility rate (GFR), which is the number of births per 1,000 females ages 15-44, “is down 22% from 2007 to 2024.” While fertility rates are down, the number of births increased by roughly 1 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to the data.
Women are delaying having children or completely casting it aside — thanks in part to the rise of the obnoxious hyper-independent girl boss mentality that has asserted that marriage and motherhood are shackles, along with the “loss of religiosity” and “availability of birth control” and abortion, as pointed out in these pages by David Harsanyi.
The result? The country is dying.
As Buchanan warned, a nation that will not reproduce will not survive. A shrinking native population leads to one inevitable outcome: mass immigration.
As noted by The Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Abbamonte, “without a substantial increase in fertility, the United States will continue to be increasingly dependent on immigration to slow down population ageing and prevent population contraction.”
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One of the most obvious results of a shrinking population is a shrinking workforce. But a workforce is rather interchangeable. A country can always import labor — the United States can import labor for the foreseeable future if there is a shortage of workers. But what a country cannot import is a culture, a heritage, a set of particular values that will help the republic endure.
America simply cannot outsource her future to people from other places. And it’s not about “xenophobia” or whatever other “phobia” the left will throw at Americans. A country — any country — that replaces its population with people from somewhere else because its own people will not reproduce becomes something else entirely. If we don’t make more Americans, we won’t have any more left. And without Americans, there will be no America.
Not only is the U.S. failing to create enough new Americans through birth — it is also failing to turn immigrants into Americans in any meaningful sense — making the prospect of boosting the dying population with foreigners even more problematic. Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. successfully assimilated millions of immigrants — Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, and so on and so forth — because they shared a foundation of similar cultural and social norms, values, and religion. They often became Americans within a single generation.
But since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, that assimilation process has broken down. America has seen a wave of mass migration from nations that are dissimilar to it. Different languages, cultures, religions, and political philosophies are all things that act as barriers to assimilation. And the one thing that could ease the assimilation process has been undermined by the left — that thing being a shared national identity. The left abhors American exceptionalism. They demonize it, teaching children and young adults that America is an evil place that must atone for her sins. So how are we supposed to assimilate foreigners into America’s culture and way of life when we ourselves have vilified and rejected our own heritage?
American birth rates have now dropped to levels of civilizational suicide. And in the vacuum left by a people that won’t reproduce, another people will — but they won’t be American.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
