The Republican Devolution

Another VDARE.com column by me: Karl Rove's pollster Matthew Dowd published an op-ed in the NYT on Monday called "The Mexican Evolution" advising conservative Republican politicians to put the the red-hot illegal immigration issue on the back-burner for the next ten election cycles in the hopes that it will go away in a couple of decades due to declining population growth in Mexico. This was such disingenuous effort that I immediate pounded out a 1,600 word debunking for VDARE.com. An excerpt:

"The Republican Devolution:" More Open Borders Shilling from the White House

By Steve Sailer

President Bush's pollster Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and is now the senior adviser to the Republican National Committee, writes in a New York Times op-ed called The Mexican Evolution [August 1, 2005] that the illegal immigration problem is solving itself.

Why? Because, in effect, the world will run out of Mexicans. According to Dowd's crystal ball, all those Americans who are now worrying their pretty little heads about illegal immigration are in for a political come-uppance. Real Soon Now.

Are you listening, Tom Tancredo?

Dowd claims:

And as these trends become more apparent to the public, politicians running on an anti-Mexican-immigrant platform will be seen as out of step… But legislators and government agencies should spend more time and resources addressing the problems of immigrants already here and our direct security needs, and much less time on prescriptive laws aimed at stemming illegal immigration from Mexico. We should be aware of the historic transformations occurring in Mexican society so that we aren't fighting a war that is already ending.

Dowd advises us all to just lie back and enjoy illegal immigration for 20 more years, and then it will go away.

Obviously, he wants us to ignore the damage illegal immigration will do to America between now and 2025, and how much trouble all the illegals who get in between now and then will continue to wreak after 2025. (Currently, almost ten percent of all births within our borders are to illegal aliens, and who knows what that fraction will be in 2025 …)

So, what evidence does Dowd muster even just for his theory that illegal immigration will wither away like the state in Karl Marx's utopia? He writes:

But chances are that there will be a substantial decrease in illegal immigration from Mexico in the next 20 years, and it won't be because of civilian border patrols, laws being passed, pronouncements by politicians, or as some would like, "building a wall on the border." Instead, the cause will be demographic trends within Mexico itself, trends that have been largely ignored in the debate over immigration.

Mexico's population growth rate has dropped by more than 50 percent during the last five decades, according to the United Nations. The annual growth rate has declined from approximately 3 percent in 1960 to 1.3 percent today. And it is expected to continue to fall in the first decades of the 21st century; by 2050, the United Nations predicts, the rate will be negative. The fertility rate in Mexico has had a corresponding significant drop, from 6.9 children per woman in 1955 to 2.5 today.

The population growth rate of Mexico is now only slightly higher than that of Canada, where recent data shows it to be 1 percent. Twenty-five years ago, Mexico had a growth rate more than twice that of Canada...

Uh, Matt, allow me to remind you that a big reason Mexico's population growth rate has dropped to "only" 30 percent higher than Canada's is because of the on going massive emigration from Mexico to the U.S. Close to one-fifth of all people of Mexican descent in the world now live in the U.S.

(Also, Canada's population growth rate is fairly substantial because its Liberal government has a pedal-to-the-metal legal immigration policy in order to manufacture more Liberal voters, an analogy that Mr. Dowd should ponder before advising the Republican National Committee to open our borders even wider.)

Even despite Mexico's high emigration rate, the U.S. Census Bureau's latest official estimate is that the population in Mexico will grow from 106 million today to 148 million in 2050. That's an increment of another 42 million … not to mention the tens of millions of extra Mexicans who will be living in our country at mid-century if the current non-enforcement of the laws continues.

Why is there such a difference between the rosy picture of Mexican population growth that Dowd paints using dabs of data and the alarming picture projected by our Census Bureau? Because Dowd is conveniently ignoring what demographers call "population momentum." "A population will typically grow for 50-60 years after reaching replacement level fertility," and Mexico hasn't even reached that birthrate yet. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer