Population figures have lately come to be used in arguments connected with U.S. immigration policy. Some opponents of that policy accuse the Administration of importing a “replacement population.” For them, that simply means politicians choosing their voters by bringing in immigrants they later provide with a “clear path to citizenship,” and a Democratic voter registration card. For others, it means changing the demographic mix of “systematically racist” America by increasing representation from Third World countries.
Proponents of lax immigration policy, however, also employ population numbers. The American Chamber of Commerce has long pushed looser immigration with the claim that it will “boost economic growth” (and increase profits by paying lower wages), and that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t.
Recently, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown in the argument that, with an aging, top-heavy, inverted demographic pyramid, we need immigrants just to work (including caring for the old gringos) and, by extension, keep our social welfare system going by paying into it.
Even Pope Francis seems to have gotten into the act, telling Jesuits in Belgium on September 28 that importing a substitute population is how a childless Europe might survive: “Europe no longer has children, it is aging. It needs migrants to renew its life. It has now become a question of survival.”
This makes me want to ask: Is parenthood among the “jobs” immigrants will do that Americans won’t?
Republican nominee J.D. Vance has been criticized for observations he’s made about childlessness and, while they have a polemical edge, their core remains valid: having babies – a social ideal, maybe even an expectation once thought natural and normal – is now deemed “weird.”
U.S. population trends are below replacement level and have been for a while. It would have been even lower but for Hispanic women having babies. But even there, fertility is falling. Still, if anybody is having babies (other than traditional Catholics), it’s immigrants.
Psychologist Erik Erikson identified “generativity” as one of the highest of his stages of psychosocial development. Those stages involve progressive exit from egocentricity towards other persons (and, in that respect, are highly Christian). Generativity differs from its preceding stage of intimacy. While intimacy takes responsibility for someone who is one’s peer, generativity involves responsibility for another for whose very existence one is responsible.
For Erikson, these stages are not mere “choices.” They are normal stages in human psychosocial development – or decline.
Yet, in our elite culture, marriage is increasingly deferred (or replaced by ersatz substitutes) while parenthood – hitherto a natural follow-on of marriage – has now become an Everest to conquer. And with the replacement of the idea of parenthood as a gift by that of parenthood as a choice, maternity and paternity are seen less as normal adult vocations and more as “jobs” whose appeal – like mowing lawns or caring for the elderly – finds fewer American takers.
Various commentators have noted the “job-ification” of American culture. We prepare kids from preschool for the “right” paths that will lead to the “right” jobs twenty-some years down the line. We plot schools, coursework, internships, and extracurricular participation to line up Junior for the “ideal” job.
Other than mention it in passing, however, do we devote anywhere near the same amount of attention to preparing Junior for the “ideal” marriage? For someday being a mother or a father? Why are those realities, those “choices,” left to the autonomous individual (usually in his spare time) while the “job” is plotted out by the village with a laser-like precision?
And, given the changing nature of American work, isn’t that also reflected in marriage and family life? Once upon a time, job permanence, stability, and loyalty were premiums. People “committed” to a good job for the long haul, whether it was with the law firm or the Big Three’s assembly line.
That’s gone, in part because of corporate policies, in part because of the “creative destruction” of the economy, in part owing to “finding oneself.” Nor is that instability limited to the job market. “Till death do us part” has become more poetry than statement.
And the permanence of parenthood is now threatened by a growing pool of contemporary women of childbearing age who reject maternity absent the “all nine-months-no-questions-asked” return policy of Roe. There’s even the creeping tendency to blur birth as a redline in stopping “unwanted children.” In fairness, that all also matches up with the established pattern of paternal abandonment.
If our culture has reduced the vocation of parenthood to a “job,” one increasingly unattractive when considered against the constellation of values modern Americans deem constitutive of the “good life,” how do we keep such a society going absent its normal continuation by children, except by importing a replacement population? We see this replacement population primarily through the lens of “work” we no longer want to perform.
Perhaps we’ll find supplemental “solutions” to our demographic dearth. Detaching parenthood from biological relations is, for some, a promising one. Just as some wealthy Chinese women offshore the burden of childbearing by contracting with American surrogates, perhaps the United States may also find childbearing the next “manufacturing industry” we can offshore to foreign surrogates.
It’s a “win-win” situation from a certain point of view: even surrogacy “expenses” in the Third World go a lot farther in purchasing power than they would here. Realistically, though, making Americans overseas is a multi-generational process, whereas Social Security’s piper may come a-callin’ a lot sooner. Bringing those “yearning to work free” here provides more immediate and tangible benefits.
Numerous popes have warned against consumerism and commodification bleeding over into our relationships with people. Pope Francis repeatedly talks about a “throwaway culture.” Perhaps American culture needs to shine a Catholic light on its proclivity to view “what matters” through economic lenses that involve the “job.” Because it seems we’ve also made childbearing a “job” that we’d like to outsource, rather than regard it as America’s Job 1 .