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.
“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.”
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
The West is grappling with radical Muslims it voluntarily imported who march in the streets praising Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre as “liberation” of “stolen land.” Polling shows 57% of U.S. Muslims believe Hamas’ attack was at least “somewhat justified.” Pictured: Supporters of Israel rally in Times Square on Oct 19. (Photo: Ed Jones/Getty Images)
The weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel—in which the most Jews were slaughtered in a single day than at any time since World War II—have seen an astonishing rise in global Jew-hatred. One might have thought that the mass carnage and unspeakable barbarism of the Hamas Holocaust would instead galvanize a concerted pushback against Islamic jihadism, but it is the ancient scourge of antisemitism—and not so-called Islamophobia—that is once again the world’s most politically correct and fashionable form of bigotry.
“In every generation, they rise up to destroy us,” Jews read in the Haggadah text every Passover, “but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”
Now, less than 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, today’s Nazis, an Islamist Reich hellbent anew on Jewish genocide, rises up to try to finish what Hitler could not. Like their brownshirt forebears, the jihadists will fail.
Our comfort in the Lord does not necessarily ameliorate the profound pain of the last few weeks, though. For many Jews, the appalling and disgusting mass demonstrations of support for the Hamas terrorists have been just as devastating as the Oct. 7 pogrom itself.
In Berlin—yes, Berlin—a synagogue was firebombed.
In Vienna, a one-time hub of Nazism, a synagogue was attacked and vandalized.
In Paris, a Jewish couple’s apartment door was doused with gasoline and set on fire.
In Los Angeles, a knife-wielding madman trespassed into a Jewish home while shouting, “Free Palestine.”
At George Washington University in the nation’s capital, student jihadists projected “Glory To Our Martyrs” onto the side of a school library.
At Cooper Union, Jewish students were locked in a library by pro-Hamas student demonstrators banging on the doors; the NYPD had to evacuate the students via underground tunnel.
In the heavily Muslim town of Dearborn, Michigan, Islamists thronged the streets while waving today’s swastika, the so-called Palestinian flag, and shouting for extermination of the Jews of Israel “from the river to the sea.”
Other examples abound.
There are many reasons for this dire state of affairs.
First, the chickens of once-fringe, leftist ivory tower piffle—such as critical theory and intersectionality—have come home to roost in a very menacing way. The avant-garde leftism of a half-century ago has led many to now justify, or outright cheer on, genocide perpetrated against the most genocide-d people in world history.
As this column observed in May 2021 during the last major Israel-Hamas conflict: “The American Left and the media organs it controls are exporting their paroxysms of ‘1619 Project‘ rage onto a foreign stage, expiating their ‘white guilt’ sins and armchair-quarterbacking a foreign conflict on a cosplayed chess board.”
It’s all just fun and games—no matter how many “eggs” are broken to make the “omelet,” to paraphrase Stalin-apologist New York Times bureau chief Walter Duranty.
But there is a second lesson from the past few weeks in addition to the harrowing real-world consequences of obscure leftist academic theories: the complete and total failure of mass migration.
For years, liberals and globalists have pushed for open-ended migration of people across borders, as if borders are entirely arbitrary (if not outright atavistic) and all cultures and ways of life are interchangeable.
As the West grapples with the very radical Muslims it voluntarily imported—hundreds of thousands of whom march in the streets of metropolises such as London and Chicago calling for Jewish genocide and thousands of others who lead vile “Students for Justice in Palestine” statements praising the Hamas massacre as a “liberation” of “stolen land”—it has become obvious that assimilation of huge numbers of non-Western immigrants into Western society is simply not working.
A shocking new poll found that 57.5% of American Muslims believe that the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7 was at least “somewhat justified.” That is simply disgusting. Jewish day schools are canceling classes due to fear; the security needed at synagogues is now unprecedented. Jews all across America and Europe have not been this terrified since World War II. And the open-borders dolts who have peddled the insane notion that “all cultures are equal” bear much of the blame.
Many leading Islamists, such as the infamous “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, long counseled immigration to the West as one of the most effective ways of spreading the global jihad. For decades, Western liberals have been all too eager to assist.
Mass migration was always delusional; all cultures are obviously not equal, let alone interchangeable. Now, given the emboldened forces of jihadism the world over, it has never been more important to turn off the spigot. And for those subversive, fifth column actors already here, deportation and denaturalization must be on the table as the law permits.
There are monsters in our midst. They must be dealt with accordingly.
Josh Hammer, a syndicated columnist, is opinion editor of Newsweek and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. He also is counsel and policy adviser for the Internet Accountability Project and contributing editor for Anchoring Truths.
AUSTIN, Texas – During a recent trip to a Reynosa, Mexico migrant camp, I took photos of a United Nations-supported International Organization for Migration (IOM) operation to hand out cash debit cards to intending and repeat border crossers. One of two workers at a plastic folding table inside the Reynosa camp, which was filled to capacity with at least 1,200 mostly U.S.-expelled Central Americans, said they were distributing the cards for IOM to help migrants waiting until they cross the Rio Grande at greater leisure to claim asylum, for which most will be declared ineligible years later. Many parents, for instance, got about $400 every 15 days, I was told, or $800 a month if they were still there to collect it, although the support level varied.
My photos of this posted to Twitter and related dispatch for the Center for Immigration Studies drew outrage among some Republican lawmakers. They saw the images as evidence that the U.S. taxpayer-funded IOM was providing material support to an ongoing mass migration harmful to America’s national interest.
A couple of weeks later, Texas Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, and 11 other House Republican co-sponsors introduced the “No Tax Dollars for the United Nations Immigration Invasion Act” bill. It would prohibit the $3.8 billion in contributions currently proposed in the White House 2022 budget to the IOM and other UN-supported organizations. A Daily Caller story that broke news of the bill’s introduction quoted Gooden citing my Reynosa photos.
When I took the photos, I wasn’t exactly sure of exactly what I was seeing in Reynosa. But here’s what I have learned since: The money card is confirmed beyond doubt, but also “hard cash in envelopes” and “movement assistance”; and an online IOM “Emergency Manual” describes what I saw as part of a program it terms “Cash-Based Interventions,” or CBIs.
A plastic IOM cash card given to an aspiring border-crossing migrant in Reynosa, Mexico on November 20. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Paying People Who Illegally Enter the United States
So, for starters, country-specific IOM “Cash Working Groups” are indeed coordinating the handouts of the cash-holding plastic cards I saw (referred to as prepaid debit cards, e-wallets and e-cards) to intending U.S. border crossers in Reynosa, Mexico. But it turns out that is just an iceberg tip. The IOM is handing out cash and other material support to intending illegal border crossers in as many as 100 other shelters it helped build, expand, or supports from Central America north. Some form of this has been around for years, but starting with a mass-migration event and Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019, the IOM supercharged the program and “institutionalized” it. This doubled the countries where it is used in 2020 and increased by 77 percent the number of recipients to 1.6 million worldwide, according to an annual 2020 IOM report. That would include Mexico.
The IOM Emergency Manual document says this cash assistance also includes less-seeable bank transfers, mobile transfers, and e-vouchers that go to intending illegal border crossers en route or at least temporarily blocked like many of those I saw and interviewed in Reynosa. In addition to those and the pre-paid plastic cards, the IOM says in its Emergency Manual that it also sometimes hands out “cash in envelopes (hard cash).” No details are offered on that. Many payments are given as “unconditional; unrestricted cash transfers” for “multi-purpose use,” the manual says. Still other handouts subsidize the lodging, rent, and utilities of intending border crossers for “safe tenure, to reduce the risk of forced eviction.”
Start Tapping U.S. Taxpayers Before You Get There
Then there is “movement assistance” in the form of conditional or unrestricted cash transfers. The IOM describes this money as providing transportation access after, say a camp is closed, but also simply “to sites and other situations related to onward movement of population.”
To border hawks, all of this looks, feels, and acts like an agency providing the means for illegal border crossings. The IOM’s own stated purpose for cash-based interventions would only reinforce the perception: the money is intended to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment for beneficiaries.”
Migrant advocates defend cash support to aspiring illegal border crossers as a means to prevent death and suffering among populations they believe have no choice but to migrate and would whether or not any UN agency helps out. But the legitimate flip side of that claim is that cash in envelopes or in e-wallets—filled in part by U.S. taxpayer money—can also be said to enable, sustain, or even entice many driven not by urgent dangers but by a desire for better jobs amid reports that Americans would let them in.
Spending U.S. Money to Encourage ‘Invasion’
An aggravating irony among the fast-expanding coterie of Republican congressional critics of the UN largesse is that U.S. taxpayer money is being spent in contravention of American immigration law and national interest in controlling the border against economic migration.
“All of this sounds like they’re using U.S. tax dollars to encourage this invasion into the nation, and it seems strange to me that we would support an organization that encourages and funds this,” Gooden told me. “It’s totally crazy. I am baffled that there’s not more outrage, but I think the lack of outrage is due to the lack of knowledge.”
While it may be true that IOM money relieves the suffering of intending border crossers, it is just as arguably true that it creates financial breathing room they need to prepare for more opportune crossing moments. The money enables that highly desired payoff, rather than a forced trip home for lack of funds after, say, an expensive smuggling journey that ended with U.S. expulsion. Those ones arrive in villages with a deterring don’t-try-this message to friends and neighbors.
Regarding the importance of such messaging in the development of mass migration crises, I’ve never met one who didn’t carry a cell phone connected to Internet social media. In interviews with perhaps hundreds of migrants in Mexico and beyond, I learned that this live-time social media grapevine constantly sings with news from the trail upstream that directly informs decisions downstream as to whether to launch north or remain in place. So when word of these IOM cash, lodging, and transportation benefits spreads via social media to hometowns, friends and relatives undoubtedly feel more emboldened to invest smuggling money for their own journeys to UN waystations. Because of all this, monthly IOM cash for food, lodging, and “movement” assistance amounts to material support for illegal immigration. It influences decisions to cross.
Increasing U.S. Cash Support for Illegal Immigration
It’s unclear just how much the United States gives IOM to sustain intending border crossers until they succeed, or how many got some during 2021. But the cash giveaways have been on a steep skyward trajectory since 2019 and only show signs of continuing upward.
The public reporting as to how much the United States, through the State Department, gives IOM and how many got it is opaque at best. President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget calls for $10 billion in humanitarian assistance “to support vulnerable people abroad.” But there’s no detailed breakout.
A Fiscal Year 2019 summary (starting page 37) by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which provides U.S. funding to the IOM and many other United Nations agencies, offers one clue of the pre-expansion levels. IOM spent more than $60 million in 2019 for activities in the northern part of South America, Central America, and Mexico during the so-called “caravan migrant crisis” earlier that year, the fiscal year report said.
State Department-funneled money helped IOM provide 29,000 people in the Western Hemisphere with cash and voucher assistance and supported 75 shelter waystations, the State Department report states on page 42, much like the one I visited in Reynosa. Along the northern border of Mexico in July 2019, at the height of a “caravan” crisis, the IOM provided 600 beds and essential items to the Mexican government and helped it expand existing shelters and build new ones to accommodate the “asylum seekers.”
This came as a response to the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” turn-back policy. That deported economic migrants trying to abuse the asylum system, while others chose to wait for Democrats to take the White House in November 2020—a sound bet, it turned out.
The IOM decided to increase the size and scope of the program after 2019, even after President Biden took office and ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The extent is unclear, but the IOM institutionalized cash handout programs in Panama, El Salvador, and Mexico in 2020. Ambiguously, the IOM’s annual 2020 report on the program showed only that it gave cash to somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people in Mexico that year.
Whatever the recipient numbers since 2019, the IOM clearly intends an upward trajectory for the cash giveaways. The IOM’s Emergency Manual stated several times it would do so in alignment with a fairly recent pact among an international consortium of organizations known as The Grand Bargain, of which the IOM is a signatory. The Grand Bargain pact dates to 2016.
An Inter-Agency Standing Committee Grand Bargain website reports that number 3 on the objectives list is “Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming.” A November 26, 2021 Grand Bargain caucus on cash coordination had all principals agree to increase the use of cash “beyond current low levels” through the use of even more means of delivery.
The section’s first line starts out using familiar language seen in the IOM’s Emergency Manual: “Using cash helps deliver greater choice and empowerment to affected people…”
Here’s the problem: with the greater choice and empowerment that IOM money can buy, aspiring migrants are able to remain within striking distance of the southern border to choose the time of their inevitable illegal border crossings. No one should wonder why border hawks hate this system and open borders advocates love it.
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd. Bensman also worked for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers. He reported extensively on national security and border issues after 9/11 and worked from more than 25 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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