The curious case of America’s waning whites

An “aging white population [is] speeding [up] diversity,” blared a headline on The Hill.

Once again, a Fake News outlet has confused cause and effect, giving readers the impression that the two trends—whites dying-out and minorities thriving—are spontaneous and strictly parallel.

The reverse is likely true. Corrected, The Hill headline should read:

Could speeding up diversity contribute to a decline in the white population?

We learn that “there are growing signs that the rate of change is increasing.” Well of course. America welcomes well over 1 million, mostly non-white, immigrants a year.

If white lives mattered at all to the liberal establishment, an inquiry would ensue: Is it possibility that an enormous influx of legal and illegal migrants over decades is playing a role in the decline of America’s founding population? (A similar, sad fate was visited on their predecessors, the Amerindians.)

On the one hand, we have the drastic decline of America’s white population; on the other, a massive inpouring of minority immigrants, since 1965. A correlation between the two makes sense. A large, well-controlled national survey, conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, found that diversity immiserates and that the historic population is most affected. Perhaps protracted misery (associated with loss of community) hastens death.

The logic posits a zero-sum game. The native population has been swamped over time. Resources are scarce—especially when allocated by a wastrel, white-hating Administrative State. In hating on whites, civil society’s institutions are as culpable.

Is it not highly plausible, then, that immigration social engineering, compounded by state policies that privilege non-white newcomers, could contribute to a population decline in white America?

Picture the following scene, set somewhere in Trump country, say West Virginia:

A pale patriarch must help his bright son choose a career.

What about pursuing the law?

That’s inadvisable (unless you become an immigration attorney). Law schools routinely reject working-class white males, in favor of students who can show they’ve overcome the right kind of hardship. Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “Unusual hardship” is a racial cue card for things like having been shot, or quitting a gang. As commentator Steve Sailer once noted wryly, “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities.” A Syrian refugee is bound to have a trump card in American universities, if Trump doesn’t deliver on his promise.

What about a degree in engineering? Oh, no, you can’t pursue that. Forget about a knack for invention; for designing and fixing gadgets, inherited from Scottish ancestors. Forget your facility with math and physics. Chances are working-class white American lads, circa 2016, will be replaced by the 65,000 H-1B Indian visa recipients, imported annually by America’s plutocracy.

Industry magnates and lobbyists are forever countering with studies that employ the “impregnable” science of econometrics to prove that all this globalist activity creates more jobs than it kills. The studies invariably beg the question, as they assume facts not in evidence. In this case, the research assumes the new jobs will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.

Speaking of the “new jobs”: Want to remain employed in the U.S.? Choose a profession, preferably service-oriented, that can’t be outsourced. Got the aptitude to probe the field of fiber optics? Bad idea. Better to become a gym instructor to the growing population of menopausal gym-bunnies.

Or, emulate the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Write a culturally compliant, elitist account of poor, white America. To pass muster with the left literati, “Hillbilly Elegy’s” eloquent author generally omits references to the systemic racial demonization and dispossession visited upon poor whites.

To be fruitful and to multiply, people need certain conditions. Good jobs, for one. Prospects for the future, for another. In this context, consider just how ruthless central planners and their scientists are in “optimizing” and “managing” the natural world. Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. Thus when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock—it has a complex, highly evolved social structure and bonds—be exterminated because it wasn’t indigenous.

While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained “natural” order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white. If you’re a rainforest pygmy, liberals will fight for your survival.

Declining birthrates have long been the excuse advanced by central planners for sticking with mass immigration policies. The aging white population is not replacing itself, say proponents of dooms-day demographics. Young, Third-World immigrants are essential to shore-up the welfare state.

However, the now-waning West became great not because it was more populated than the rest of the world and outbred it. The West was great because of its human capital—innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs to allow its own people to recover.

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and thinker based in the US. Her weekly column was begun in Canada in 1999. (Articles Archive.) Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 2016) and Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank). Follow ilana on Twitter,  Gab, Facebook,
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