Ignoring the Fundamental Question
The sky is falling!
Yet another dire warning appeared in an Epoch Times article, Will Falling Birth Rates Mean a More Conservative World? (6 February 2026):
... The peak U.S. fertility rate, or the projection of how many children the median woman would have if current birth rates continued, hovered above 3.5 and then plunged to 1.74 in the bicentennial year of 1976, just about the same as 2025's 1.79.
Fertility rates remained low in the 1980s, then rose and occasionally reached the replacement rate of 2.1 in the high-immigration 1990s through the Great Recession of 2007. The latest rate was an uptick from the 1.6 levels of the COVID-19-affected 2020–24 period...
American women voluntarily achieved replacement-level fertility (2.1 children per woman) in 1972. That wasn't the end of the world; in fact it was a good thing. After all, physical population growth cannot continue indefinitely within the finite borders of any given nation. Stabilizing population is a viable objective - indeed, it's necessary.
The Fundamental Question
The fundamental question is: how many is enough?
America's population was 180 million in the 1960s. America at that time was a pretty good place in which to live.
However, Congress, manifesting infinite wisdom, foresaw this dismal population stabilization trend and passed the Immigration Reform and Nationality Act of 1965. Since then, mass immigration has been driving US population to double within the lifetimes of children born today.
Now we're at 342 million, racing at breakneck speed to match India and China in the one billion club.
Nobody in America is asking the fundamental question.
The article continues:
And it's not just the United States. Plunging birth rates are a worldwide phenomenon. Europe's fertility rates have been well below replacement for years, with nations' under-70 populations set to fall by 20 percent in the next decade, not only in economically stagnant Britain and France, where births are tilted toward immigrants, but also in rapidly growing, low-immigration Poland...
China, despite the repeal of its one-child policy in 2015, saw its fertility rate plunge to 0.9 in 2025...
China asked the fundamental question. China implemented a one-child policy precisely because they understood the consequences of runaway population growth. A declining fertility rate indicates the real possibility of decreasing, and then stabilizing their population.
The article continues:
... American conservatives and progressives each had a fertility rate of 2.7 in 1980, well above replacement level. In the 2020s, conservatives' fertility rate has dropped marginally to about 2.4, still above replacement level.
But the progressives' rate has fallen to 1.8, below replacement level, and generally tracks the pattern in economically developed countries...
Extrapolate those trends outward, and you see something like the picture revealed in the Census Bureau's recently released 2026 estimates of states' populations. They showed two-thirds of the national population increase occurring in safe red 2024 states, 21 percent in the seven seriously contested purple states, and only 11 percent in the safe blue states...
Now that's interesting.
And the sky isn't falling.