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“Great Replacement” Paranoia Will Lead to a Handmaid’s Tale Dystopia
Immigration restrictions won’t stop the browning of America: only ending women’s rights — even white women’s — can do that
Building a wall won’t be enough.
Neither will rounding up millions of undocumented folks and shipping them out of the country in cattle cars, planes, or buses.
Putting aside the impracticality and immorality of both actions, even on the terms favored by their advocates, such things would fail to deliver.
Though immigration restrictionists insist walls and deportation are needed to halt the “Great Replacement” of traditional American culture and “legacy Americans” — by which they mean white folks, even if they don’t say it — the demographic shifts about which they are so concerned, actually have little to do with immigration at all.
As such, even were we to end all immigration to the U.S. by brown-skinned folks from the global south — documented or not — America would continue to become less white.
Because the issue has never been immigration.
The issue is birth rates.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not parroting the right-wing myth that Black and brown women are uniquely disposed to having multiple children as some scheme to score public assistance.
That’s always been bullshit.
But fertility rates among women of color are higher than the rates for white women for one simple reason: women of color in the U.S. are younger, on average, than white women.
For instance, the median age of white women in the United States is 45.
For Black women, it’s 36.
For Latinas, it’s 31.
And it should be obvious that 31–36 year olds are far more likely to have kids than women in their mid-to-late 40s.
So even if all the undocumented Latinas were shipped out of the country tomorrow and no more were allowed in, the median age of fully legal Hispanic women in this country would remain within an age range of high fertility — not peak, but high enough to ensure continued birth rates…
