Making more Americans
For all that they are ignored by 40-something American academics and callow college students convinced that marriage and children are nothing more than one of many potential lifestyle choices, the demographic threats to Western Civilization described by Pat Buchanan in "The Death of the West" are being taken very seriously by European governments.
In Switzerland, for example, monthly payments of up $265 per child are made, depending on the canton, irrespective of family income and with the amount increasing with each additional child beyond two. In both England and Italy, on the other hand the direct child benefit is wage-related, but runs around $200 and $120 per month, respectively.
Unfortunately for these increasingly demographically challenged countries, these generous child benefits have had the perverse affect of making immigration more attractive to impoverished Third World families, while failing to increase the birth rates of their citizenries. Though $12,720 may not seem like much to an American family with four children, it is obviously of great interest to individuals hailing from countries where the average income per capita is less than one-third that amount.
The reason that demographic decline is not yet on American radar is that the importation of 21 million legal immigrants who are demonstrably more fecund than native Americans over the last 30 years has kept the United States fairly close to the 2.1 child per woman replacement level. This strategy has also been successfully implemented by France, which alone among European nations has avoided a plunge in its birth rates, although the French have recently begun to reconsider the wisdom of embracing an Islamic majority in a nominal democracy.
But being a nation of immigrants, most Americans are more than a little uncomfortable with the idea that immigration can be a bad thing, or that there can be too much immigration. Libertarians cling to the romantic notion of open borders while Democrats scent a whiff of racism in the notion, and establishment Republicans are petrified at the notion that wages might increase if their supply of low-wage workers is curtailed. Only the conservative wing of the Republican Party seems to grasp the basic concept that too much of an otherwise good thing can be fatal.
The problem with population growth by immigration is that it is, at best, unproven and, at worst, insane to assert that families consisting of illiterate peasants from Guatemala and Somalia, murderous thugs from Rwanda and Liberia, and communist-educated professionals from China and Vietnam can be seamlessly incorporated into American society and its tradition of constitutionally limited government without irrevocably changing it.
This has nothing to do with race - it is an obvious question of cultural tradition. The national myth of the melting pot necessitates melting, after all, and it should be obvious that the embrace of diversity amounts to precisely the opposite. The problems certain to result from welcoming immigrants - who possess cultural consciousnesses steeped in centuries of totalitarian rule - might be a little less obvious than importing millions of headhunters from Papua New Guinea and celebrating the diversity of their cultural tradition. But while these problems might also take longer to manifest, manifest they most definitely will.
So, if economically productive Americans cannot manage to replace themselves on their own, if direct financial incentives have proven ineffective, and if immigration poses a threat to the continuation of Western cultural traditions, is there anything that can be done?
The answer is yes, but what is required is a means of providing an incentive that is of appeal to the economically productive classes in the West that simultaneously harbors no appeal to immigrants and the economically unproductive.
One major reason the educated middle classes do not have more children today is their fear of being unable to provide their children with a middle-class lifestyle in a time when their major expenses - housing, health insurance, education and taxes - are increasing dramatically. An easy means of reducing their family expenses is to delay having children and to reduce the number they have, which the statistics clearly demonstrate middle-class Americans have done.
While the federal government can and should reduce the costs of housing, health insurance and education by ending its policies and regulations which have an inflationary effect on those industries, the easiest and most effective means of encouraging families to have more children is to eliminate all federal taxes on families with more than three dependent children. This incentive would be meaningless to the economically unproductive classes that pay no taxes, but would become increasingly appealing as a family's income rose.
Since wealth and the number of children now tend to negatively correlate, this policy would serve to counteract that correlation, as well as providing a powerful incentive for married couples with children to avoid divorce.
While such a policy would doubtless provoke howls of outrage from the childless, there is no logical reason why a government that already regulates social behavior in a myriad of ways should not act to materially incentivize the only group within American society that is acting to perpetuate it.