When he ran for president in 2016, Jeb Bush proclaimed that mass immigration is a good thing because ”immigrants are more fertile.” The idea was that this superior fertility would help to reverse the aging trend of our society. Immigration advocates commonly repeat this claim. Nevertheless, immigration will not do much to make us younger.
In an analysis of data from the the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that “The fertility of immigrant women is somewhat higher than that of the U.S.-born; however, the presence of immigrants has only a small impact on raising overall fertility in the United States. The small impact on overall fertility rates is one of the reasons immigration does not significantly undo population aging in the United States.”
CIS also noted that “There is also some evidence that immigration may actually lower the fertility of the U.S.-born, perhaps by driving up housing costs, thereby reducing or potentially erasing immigration’s small positive impact on overall U.S. fertility.” Another possibility for lower native fertility–not mentioned by CIS–is that many native-born people may not want to bring children into an America that is ceasing to resemble the country they have known and loved.
Read more at cis.org