I can’t bring myself to endorse this piece. It’s true that we need immigration. It’s true that Trump’s policies on immigration and a great many other things are detrimental to the economy. But the headline about negative growth is fear-mongering. There’s nothing special about zero. And the reason we’re near zero isn’t just immigration. It’s also that our housing crisis is so severe that young couples don’t feel like they can afford a child. It’s also that young couples simply aren’t forming because they’re too online and politically polarized. If you want to declare a state of emergency about population decline, which may be justified, you really have to express urgent concern for all of these factors. Otherwise, it’s a bad-faith effort to funnel all the attention to your pet issue.
Impact of population shrink is long term, president just need to hold on for four years, throw money at AI and claim robots will build all the homes etc, except the so-called technology miracle so far only managed to make American students dumber.
The important distinction between illegal and legal immigration is missing in this piece. Naturally, if one hates Trump, it easier to attack the current admin's attempts to fix the huge illegal influx issue by conflating the two groups.
A guest worker program could easily fix any labor shortage but Dems will block any law without amnesty for millions of illegals. The US needs some immigrants, but we should picking them just as some other developed countries do.
it seems like they don't want legal immigrants either. or did i miss their well thought out immigration plan? I think the point is that Miller etc are white nationalists, who only want "the right kind" of immigrants. We've seen this story before in American history. Certainly we've had too much illegal immigration and we need to fix the system. It will need to be more than just "guest" workers, and it's a both/and proposition. We can both grant amnesty to a certain number of people who have been here a long time and have established families, careers etc here, AND we can secure the border AND create a sound, sane immigration policy. I'm not sure you're right about it being the Dems fault, it seems like the GOP thrives on xenophobia and racism (look at Trump's success), and would rather campaign on anti-immigrant rhetoric rather than pro-immigration, growth-focused sane policies.
I'd be shocked if the Trump administration grants a million green cards this year. And if they deport a million people, like they want to, that's net zero growth. About 1/2 growth in employment comes from immigration, with zero growth you can kiss that bye bye. We need at least 2 million immigrants annually just to keep pace, more than that if we want to grow the economy and pay for an aging population.
Trump isn't attacking illegal immigration. He's attacking all immigration. No part of his program draws a distinction. Trump's ICE isn't even particularly concerned with whether a target is actually a citizen. A big part of the program is to short circuit any investigation into immigration status. If Trump were serious about illegal immigration, we'd be seeing a big ramp up in the immigration investigative and judicial system to clear the huge backlog of cases. (I'd sure be more than glad to see that backlog cleared and proper immigrants granted visas and illegal immigrants deported. Unfortunately, that would cost money and take a year or two to ramp up, so it's a political non-starter.)
Exactly. This is in no way about having a rational immigration policy. It’s just pure racism and ethnic cleansing. If you think that sounds extreme do some research on Stephen Miller and his ties with white supremacists.
Yes, this is the unfortunate reality of the current political situation: Dems won't support any kind of limits on the welfare state that creates perverse incentives, and GQP is totally opposed to immigration no matter how good a particular immigrant's presence is for Americans.
"Trump's ICE isn't even particularly concerned with whether a target is actually a citizen."
That is a big claim that is not supported by facts. A quick search shows several US citizens were incorrectly detained this year but then released and NOT deported and two US citizen children of a woman here illegally were deported with her -I guess separating them is preferred. Given the magnitude of the illegal problem (10 to 20 million) it's appropriate to say there is "zero evidence of widespread" ICE deportations of US citizens.
It's pretty well supported. If Trump and his people gave a crap about not arresting and deporting citizens, we'd be seeing proper arrest warrants issued after showing due cause. When ICE starts acting like an American law enforcement agency, it will become easier to accept them as such. There's a reason they wear masks and refuse to show identification let alone follow proper legal procedures. They're ashamed of what they do. Even they know better.
Unfettered illegal immigration is like a drug that felt good in the beginning but will ultimately kill us. There is room for a compromise: strict border control and visa enforcement coupled with expanded legal immigration, especially of seasonal workers. If the Democrats don't include border control in their 2028 platform, there is no way they will win.
The US population can and has grown through fertility alone. Progressive birth rates have plummeted, while conservatives have remained steady above replacement rate. In an age of automation, we don’t need immigrants undercutting wages for American workers. Healthcare, education, and housing will improve if they are prioritized for Americans instead of 100 million foreigners - many of whom are on welfare. Democrats can’t keep importing voters and cheap labor. President autopen and his minions opened the floodgates to help blue states that were losing population keep their house seats by including illegals in the census.
I am not convinced that population declines are inflationary. We have few manufacturing jobs, new housing is a vanishingly small part of the market, and most services are discretionary. Yes, produce on net might be slightly more expensive, but that’s just not a meaningful share of the economy.
Perhaps in the medium term price levels are forced to be elevated to compensate for the lack of available labor and increased worker power. But I don’t see how a shock like this which will primarily hit demand more so than supply is in fact going to drive up prices.
If you look at places like Japan, Europe, and China aging has been met with little price growth or deflation. Old people just do not consume much and our health care costs have little to do with wages and more with graft, self-dealing and inefficient markets.
The immigration question was always my biggest issue with Abundance: who is going to be doing all that building—of housing, energy infrastructure, etc? It’s sure as hell not going to be native-born American construction workers (excuse me while I laugh under my breath at the idea)
On the contrary, the data does not support this mindset. In 2024, the BLS found that 14.1% of native born men worked in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations. Lower than the 22.7% of foreign born men, but hardly an all or nothing proposition. Given that there’s slack in youth employment, especially young men, I think we’re far for running into any issues.
I’m all for more immigration, but I don’t think it’s worth overstating the stakes.
Most US construction workers are native born, though. About 3/4 overall and about 2/3 of the trades. So the issue is shortage, not that Americans are not currently doing the work.
Why is that an "issue"? Any plan for the US to have a happy future involves some reasonable level of immigration. And any honest reflection on US history recognizes that persistently high levels of immigration has been one of our strongest assets.
I think national population changes might be subtle to people though, and what they notice is regional changes. There, we already have a mix of growing regions and shrinking regions. Like in NY, the city continues to grow while upstate shrinks. It's not clear to me that national changes would really feel different, or like just a subtle acceleration of the movement to winner cities that has already been happening.
Well said. I'd only add that NIMBY policies in most US cities are getting in the way, and need to be fixed so these cities can actually be economical attractive.
To see the endgame here, look to Japan. Practically everything important happens in Tokyo, even as the entire country is in a long-term intractable decline. I haven't experienced this personally, but I've heard people say even Tokyo feels less alive now than it did in the 90s.
we would start to look like Japan, slow growth, aging population, huge debt, hollowed out and depopulated rural areas. Pretty grim, and totally stupid and avoidable.
Yes, but how bad does Japan look to the people living there? Can people afford places to live? Can they get medical care? Can they afford food and clothing? What about transportation and entertainment? There's a lot of concern about dependent old people and "bad" economic numbers, but decisions are made by individuals. In the end, it's about the individual point of view.
P.S. A lot of this is about aesthetics. Young people are prettier than old people.Young people do prettier things than old people. Even if the dependency ratios are the same, people are going to prefer to look at children.
This glosses over the long term problem. The argument is that our society as it is currently constructed requires indefinite population growth by whatever means. The population can't peak at 500 million or a billion. The population has to keep growing or the same structural problems reappear, so we're either talking about deferring societal collapse perhaps until we reach a population of a billion, perhaps ten billion, perhaps 100 billion.
Yes, this is absurd. This post makes a good argument for the necessity of continued growth but ignores the obvious eventuality. Could this planet support a human population of a trillion? Kicking the can down the road or into outer space is not going to help us address the structural problem we are already facing today.
You cited a study that purports to show that three years after removal of immigrants the building industry reduced their building activities by one year’s worth of new house supplies. You immediately jumped to the conclusion that this caused housing price inflation. But you didn’t say that this conclusion was from the study. So it’s your conclusion. And it’s flawed, because you failed to account for reduced demand.
Why can’t we tax the top 1% of individuals and Fortune 500 companies to pay for Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare? It all doesn’t have to fall on the upper middle class
No, that's saying that taxing the 1% is not sufficient to fund current levels of spending and we'll need to raise taxes on the middle and upper middle class as well.
I'll agree with that. I've just heard the it wouldn't be enough so let's not even try argument too many times. I unfairly assumed that was your line of reasoning.
Targeted and overly unfair tax policy results in capital flight. France has dealt with this with many of its highest tax payers leaving the country. Broad taxes that must be paid by anyone that participates in the US economy work better at brining in revenue without chasing away payers.
The wealthy move their tax homes as they always have, but they still want to spend their time in high tax places like New York City and Paris. Like everyone, they want the goodies without having to pay for them, and this is more extreme for the extremely wealthy. It's easy to make new billionaires. Let the old ones leave and tax them if they try to come back.
Social Security and Medicare are not welfare programs. One earns benefits by paying into the system for decades.
No one has to buy their way into Medicaid though, which is as it should be. But the world's most successful safety-net programs (EU/UK mostly) work because taxpayers at every level, except the poor, pay relatively high tax rates.
In 20–30 years—maybe sooner—AI won’t just assist humanity, it will replace the systems we cling to now. Robots will do almost all work better than us. Politicians will be remembered like powdered wigs: outdated, ceremonial, and useless. Money itself will vanish because what’s the point of currency when machines can produce everything in limitless abundance?
This isn’t a fantasy—it’s the natural endgame of technology. The future won’t ask our permission, and it won’t look like “business as usual.” Iain M. Banks described it decades ago in his Culture novels: a post-scarcity civilization where human struggle over power and survival becomes laughably irrelevant.
People who think society will keep limping along with the same politics, jobs, and economies are deluding themselves. The old order is already dying—it just hasn’t realized it yet.
I think we need to operate on the assumption that AI will not be that world-changing precisely because if it is, all our political debates become irrelevant. We need not and/or cannot prepare for that scenario. But if AI does not change the world to that degree, what we do now does matter.
So basically you are subscribing to the philosophy of the Dalai Lama?
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
-- Dalai Lama XIV
I look forward to the new world that AI will bring. Very few outside of the power brokers believe that the current state of affairs is workable for much longer, let alone optimum for human civilization
I am a big fan of immigration; I am a third-generation immigrant married to a first-generation immigrant. But any socioeconomic system that relies on immigration to sustain itself is doomed eventually. The global supply of desirable immigrants is limited and shrinking rapidly as the world is lifted out of poverty, so there is going to be a termination shock eventually. I suspect that what Trump is doing now is probably worse than this inevitable termination shock, but I have not seen any modeling of this.
We need immigration, yes, but we also need to figure out how to make an economic system that will not collapse into stagflation and insolvency if the population stops growing.
Fact-check time! This is what you don't get on Substack that probably wouldn't fly at the Atlantic:
"A smaller workforce means lower output (stagnation)" — not if productivity increases, or people who dropped out of the labor force are enticed back in through higher wages!
And, after all, isn't that the whole goal with a tighter immigration policy? To get American businesses to invest in better productivity (manufactured homes! more automated harvesting!) or pay prevailing wages for domestic, rather than illegally-imported labor?
I'm not shocked that Derek would be so avowedly neoliberal. I am shocked that he wouldn't at least charitably consider some of the counterarguments. E.g. https://substack.com/home/post/p-172095904
Derek, Well thought-out and constructed essay. Thanks. Too bad your readers of it are not the people who should read it. Looking back, one can feel the changes caused by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision and a few other decisions that followed which created unchecked corporate bribery. Just consider the mute GOP Congress. These legal changes placed the country on a glide path towards a future with dragons ahead.
I can’t bring myself to endorse this piece. It’s true that we need immigration. It’s true that Trump’s policies on immigration and a great many other things are detrimental to the economy. But the headline about negative growth is fear-mongering. There’s nothing special about zero. And the reason we’re near zero isn’t just immigration. It’s also that our housing crisis is so severe that young couples don’t feel like they can afford a child. It’s also that young couples simply aren’t forming because they’re too online and politically polarized. If you want to declare a state of emergency about population decline, which may be justified, you really have to express urgent concern for all of these factors. Otherwise, it’s a bad-faith effort to funnel all the attention to your pet issue.
I think Derek's been pretty consistent (especially for a center-left writer) in tackling these other issues that you are mentioning. For example, here: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-the-housing-market-for-young.
Ah, well that’s something, at least.
Impact of population shrink is long term, president just need to hold on for four years, throw money at AI and claim robots will build all the homes etc, except the so-called technology miracle so far only managed to make American students dumber.
The important distinction between illegal and legal immigration is missing in this piece. Naturally, if one hates Trump, it easier to attack the current admin's attempts to fix the huge illegal influx issue by conflating the two groups.
A guest worker program could easily fix any labor shortage but Dems will block any law without amnesty for millions of illegals. The US needs some immigrants, but we should picking them just as some other developed countries do.
it seems like they don't want legal immigrants either. or did i miss their well thought out immigration plan? I think the point is that Miller etc are white nationalists, who only want "the right kind" of immigrants. We've seen this story before in American history. Certainly we've had too much illegal immigration and we need to fix the system. It will need to be more than just "guest" workers, and it's a both/and proposition. We can both grant amnesty to a certain number of people who have been here a long time and have established families, careers etc here, AND we can secure the border AND create a sound, sane immigration policy. I'm not sure you're right about it being the Dems fault, it seems like the GOP thrives on xenophobia and racism (look at Trump's success), and would rather campaign on anti-immigrant rhetoric rather than pro-immigration, growth-focused sane policies.
We already bring in about a million people.A year through legal immigration
I'd be shocked if the Trump administration grants a million green cards this year. And if they deport a million people, like they want to, that's net zero growth. About 1/2 growth in employment comes from immigration, with zero growth you can kiss that bye bye. We need at least 2 million immigrants annually just to keep pace, more than that if we want to grow the economy and pay for an aging population.
Trump isn't attacking illegal immigration. He's attacking all immigration. No part of his program draws a distinction. Trump's ICE isn't even particularly concerned with whether a target is actually a citizen. A big part of the program is to short circuit any investigation into immigration status. If Trump were serious about illegal immigration, we'd be seeing a big ramp up in the immigration investigative and judicial system to clear the huge backlog of cases. (I'd sure be more than glad to see that backlog cleared and proper immigrants granted visas and illegal immigrants deported. Unfortunately, that would cost money and take a year or two to ramp up, so it's a political non-starter.)
Exactly. This is in no way about having a rational immigration policy. It’s just pure racism and ethnic cleansing. If you think that sounds extreme do some research on Stephen Miller and his ties with white supremacists.
Yes, this is the unfortunate reality of the current political situation: Dems won't support any kind of limits on the welfare state that creates perverse incentives, and GQP is totally opposed to immigration no matter how good a particular immigrant's presence is for Americans.
"Trump's ICE isn't even particularly concerned with whether a target is actually a citizen."
That is a big claim that is not supported by facts. A quick search shows several US citizens were incorrectly detained this year but then released and NOT deported and two US citizen children of a woman here illegally were deported with her -I guess separating them is preferred. Given the magnitude of the illegal problem (10 to 20 million) it's appropriate to say there is "zero evidence of widespread" ICE deportations of US citizens.
It's pretty well supported. If Trump and his people gave a crap about not arresting and deporting citizens, we'd be seeing proper arrest warrants issued after showing due cause. When ICE starts acting like an American law enforcement agency, it will become easier to accept them as such. There's a reason they wear masks and refuse to show identification let alone follow proper legal procedures. They're ashamed of what they do. Even they know better.
Unfettered illegal immigration is like a drug that felt good in the beginning but will ultimately kill us. There is room for a compromise: strict border control and visa enforcement coupled with expanded legal immigration, especially of seasonal workers. If the Democrats don't include border control in their 2028 platform, there is no way they will win.
Right. Most illegal immigration is because the legal immigration system is totally dysfunctional.
The US population can and has grown through fertility alone. Progressive birth rates have plummeted, while conservatives have remained steady above replacement rate. In an age of automation, we don’t need immigrants undercutting wages for American workers. Healthcare, education, and housing will improve if they are prioritized for Americans instead of 100 million foreigners - many of whom are on welfare. Democrats can’t keep importing voters and cheap labor. President autopen and his minions opened the floodgates to help blue states that were losing population keep their house seats by including illegals in the census.
Did you even read the article?
It wasn't written in MAGA and you also may be responding to a bot.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I am not convinced that population declines are inflationary. We have few manufacturing jobs, new housing is a vanishingly small part of the market, and most services are discretionary. Yes, produce on net might be slightly more expensive, but that’s just not a meaningful share of the economy.
Perhaps in the medium term price levels are forced to be elevated to compensate for the lack of available labor and increased worker power. But I don’t see how a shock like this which will primarily hit demand more so than supply is in fact going to drive up prices.
If you look at places like Japan, Europe, and China aging has been met with little price growth or deflation. Old people just do not consume much and our health care costs have little to do with wages and more with graft, self-dealing and inefficient markets.
Never stop conflating illegal immigration and legal immigration. That’s your THING! Yay
not just his thing! it's the way he's been taught to think
Too stringent barriers to legal immigration did the conflation. Many illegal immigrants would be legal ones if our immigration laws were less stupid.
The immigration question was always my biggest issue with Abundance: who is going to be doing all that building—of housing, energy infrastructure, etc? It’s sure as hell not going to be native-born American construction workers (excuse me while I laugh under my breath at the idea)
On the contrary, the data does not support this mindset. In 2024, the BLS found that 14.1% of native born men worked in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations. Lower than the 22.7% of foreign born men, but hardly an all or nothing proposition. Given that there’s slack in youth employment, especially young men, I think we’re far for running into any issues.
I’m all for more immigration, but I don’t think it’s worth overstating the stakes.
Most US construction workers are native born, though. About 3/4 overall and about 2/3 of the trades. So the issue is shortage, not that Americans are not currently doing the work.
Why is that an "issue"? Any plan for the US to have a happy future involves some reasonable level of immigration. And any honest reflection on US history recognizes that persistently high levels of immigration has been one of our strongest assets.
It's an issue with how they wrote the book—in that they didn't address immigration—not that immigration is an issue!
I think national population changes might be subtle to people though, and what they notice is regional changes. There, we already have a mix of growing regions and shrinking regions. Like in NY, the city continues to grow while upstate shrinks. It's not clear to me that national changes would really feel different, or like just a subtle acceleration of the movement to winner cities that has already been happening.
Well said. I'd only add that NIMBY policies in most US cities are getting in the way, and need to be fixed so these cities can actually be economical attractive.
To see the endgame here, look to Japan. Practically everything important happens in Tokyo, even as the entire country is in a long-term intractable decline. I haven't experienced this personally, but I've heard people say even Tokyo feels less alive now than it did in the 90s.
we would start to look like Japan, slow growth, aging population, huge debt, hollowed out and depopulated rural areas. Pretty grim, and totally stupid and avoidable.
Yes, but how bad does Japan look to the people living there? Can people afford places to live? Can they get medical care? Can they afford food and clothing? What about transportation and entertainment? There's a lot of concern about dependent old people and "bad" economic numbers, but decisions are made by individuals. In the end, it's about the individual point of view.
P.S. A lot of this is about aesthetics. Young people are prettier than old people.Young people do prettier things than old people. Even if the dependency ratios are the same, people are going to prefer to look at children.
"Many voters hated the era of record immigration. They might hate the era of record deportations even more."
+1
This glosses over the long term problem. The argument is that our society as it is currently constructed requires indefinite population growth by whatever means. The population can't peak at 500 million or a billion. The population has to keep growing or the same structural problems reappear, so we're either talking about deferring societal collapse perhaps until we reach a population of a billion, perhaps ten billion, perhaps 100 billion.
Yes, this is absurd. This post makes a good argument for the necessity of continued growth but ignores the obvious eventuality. Could this planet support a human population of a trillion? Kicking the can down the road or into outer space is not going to help us address the structural problem we are already facing today.
You are being disingenuous.
You cited a study that purports to show that three years after removal of immigrants the building industry reduced their building activities by one year’s worth of new house supplies. You immediately jumped to the conclusion that this caused housing price inflation. But you didn’t say that this conclusion was from the study. So it’s your conclusion. And it’s flawed, because you failed to account for reduced demand.
So either you are disingenuous or plain stupid.
Why can’t we tax the top 1% of individuals and Fortune 500 companies to pay for Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare? It all doesn’t have to fall on the upper middle class
Because the tax deficit is large enough that taxing the 1% is not sufficient.
That's saying we shouldn't tax anyone because taxing any particular group is insufficient to balance the budget.
No, that's saying that taxing the 1% is not sufficient to fund current levels of spending and we'll need to raise taxes on the middle and upper middle class as well.
I'll agree with that. I've just heard the it wouldn't be enough so let's not even try argument too many times. I unfairly assumed that was your line of reasoning.
Targeted and overly unfair tax policy results in capital flight. France has dealt with this with many of its highest tax payers leaving the country. Broad taxes that must be paid by anyone that participates in the US economy work better at brining in revenue without chasing away payers.
The wealthy move their tax homes as they always have, but they still want to spend their time in high tax places like New York City and Paris. Like everyone, they want the goodies without having to pay for them, and this is more extreme for the extremely wealthy. It's easy to make new billionaires. Let the old ones leave and tax them if they try to come back.
Social Security and Medicare are not welfare programs. One earns benefits by paying into the system for decades.
No one has to buy their way into Medicaid though, which is as it should be. But the world's most successful safety-net programs (EU/UK mostly) work because taxpayers at every level, except the poor, pay relatively high tax rates.
In 20–30 years—maybe sooner—AI won’t just assist humanity, it will replace the systems we cling to now. Robots will do almost all work better than us. Politicians will be remembered like powdered wigs: outdated, ceremonial, and useless. Money itself will vanish because what’s the point of currency when machines can produce everything in limitless abundance?
This isn’t a fantasy—it’s the natural endgame of technology. The future won’t ask our permission, and it won’t look like “business as usual.” Iain M. Banks described it decades ago in his Culture novels: a post-scarcity civilization where human struggle over power and survival becomes laughably irrelevant.
People who think society will keep limping along with the same politics, jobs, and economies are deluding themselves. The old order is already dying—it just hasn’t realized it yet.
I think we need to operate on the assumption that AI will not be that world-changing precisely because if it is, all our political debates become irrelevant. We need not and/or cannot prepare for that scenario. But if AI does not change the world to that degree, what we do now does matter.
So basically you are subscribing to the philosophy of the Dalai Lama?
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
-- Dalai Lama XIV
I look forward to the new world that AI will bring. Very few outside of the power brokers believe that the current state of affairs is workable for much longer, let alone optimum for human civilization
I am a big fan of immigration; I am a third-generation immigrant married to a first-generation immigrant. But any socioeconomic system that relies on immigration to sustain itself is doomed eventually. The global supply of desirable immigrants is limited and shrinking rapidly as the world is lifted out of poverty, so there is going to be a termination shock eventually. I suspect that what Trump is doing now is probably worse than this inevitable termination shock, but I have not seen any modeling of this.
We need immigration, yes, but we also need to figure out how to make an economic system that will not collapse into stagflation and insolvency if the population stops growing.
Fact-check time! This is what you don't get on Substack that probably wouldn't fly at the Atlantic:
"A smaller workforce means lower output (stagnation)" — not if productivity increases, or people who dropped out of the labor force are enticed back in through higher wages!
And, after all, isn't that the whole goal with a tighter immigration policy? To get American businesses to invest in better productivity (manufactured homes! more automated harvesting!) or pay prevailing wages for domestic, rather than illegally-imported labor?
I'm not shocked that Derek would be so avowedly neoliberal. I am shocked that he wouldn't at least charitably consider some of the counterarguments. E.g. https://substack.com/home/post/p-172095904
Derek, Well thought-out and constructed essay. Thanks. Too bad your readers of it are not the people who should read it. Looking back, one can feel the changes caused by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision and a few other decisions that followed which created unchecked corporate bribery. Just consider the mute GOP Congress. These legal changes placed the country on a glide path towards a future with dragons ahead.