Opinion

The Curious Case Of America’s Waning Whites

Ilana Mercer Author, The Trump Revolution
Font Size:

An “aging white population [is] speeding [up] diversity,” blared a headline on The Hill.

Once again, a Fake News outlet has confused cause and effect, giving readers the impression that the two trends—whites dying-out and minorities thriving—are spontaneous and strictly parallel.

The reverse is likely true. Corrected, The Hill headline should read:

Could speeding up diversity contribute to a decline in the white population?

We learn that “there are growing signs that the rate of change is increasing.” Well of course. America welcomes well over 1 million, mostly non-white, immigrants a year.

If white lives mattered at all to the liberal establishment, an inquiry would ensue: Is it possibility that an enormous influx of legal and illegal migrants over decades is playing a role in the decline of America’s founding population? (A similar, sad fate was visited on their predecessors, the Amerindians.)

On the one hand, we have the drastic decline of America’s white population; on the other, a massive inpouring of minority immigrants, since 1965. A correlation between the two makes sense. A large, well-controlled national survey, conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, found that diversity immiserates and that the historic population is most affected. Perhaps protracted misery (associated with loss of community) hastens death.

The logic posits a zero-sum game. The native population has been swamped over time. Resources are scarce—especially when allocated by a wastrel, white-hating Administrative State. In hating on whites, civil society’s institutions are as culpable.

Is it not highly plausible, then, that immigration social engineering, compounded by state policies that privilege non-white newcomers, could contribute to a population decline in white America?

Picture the following scene, set somewhere in Trump country, say West Virginia:

A pale patriarch must help his bright son choose a career.

What about pursuing the law?

That’s inadvisable (unless you become an immigration attorney). Law schools routinely reject working-class white males, in favor of students who can show they’ve overcome the right kind of hardship. Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “Unusual hardship” is a racial cue card for things like having been shot, or quitting a gang. As commentator Steve Sailer once noted wryly, “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities.” A Syrian refugee is bound to have a trump card in American universities, if Trump doesn’t deliver on his promise.

What about a degree in engineering? Oh, no, you can’t pursue that. Forget about a knack for invention; for designing and fixing gadgets, inherited from Scottish ancestors. Forget your facility with math and physics. Chances are working-class white American lads, circa 2016, will be replaced by the 65,000 H-1B Indian visa recipients, imported annually by America’s plutocracy.

Industry magnates and lobbyists are forever countering with studies that employ the “impregnable” science of econometrics to prove that all this globalist activity creates more jobs than it kills. The studies invariably beg the question, as they assume facts not in evidence. In this case, the research assumes the new jobs will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.

Speaking of the “new jobs”: Want to remain employed in the U.S.? Choose a profession, preferably service-oriented, that can’t be outsourced. Got the aptitude to probe the field of fiber optics? Bad idea. Better to become a gym instructor to the growing population of menopausal gym-bunnies.

Or, emulate the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Write a culturally compliant, elitist account of poor, white America. To pass muster with the left literati, “Hillbilly Elegy’s” eloquent author generally omits references to the systemic racial demonization and dispossession visited upon poor whites.

To be fruitful and to multiply, people need certain conditions. Good jobs, for one. Prospects for the future, for another. In this context, consider just how ruthless central planners and their scientists are in “optimizing” and “managing” the natural world. Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. Thus when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock—it has a complex, highly evolved social structure and bonds—be exterminated because it wasn’t indigenous.

While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained “natural” order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white. If you’re a rainforest pygmy, liberals will fight for your survival.

Declining birthrates have long been the excuse advanced by central planners for sticking with mass immigration policies. The aging white population is not replacing itself, say proponents of dooms-day demographics. Young, Third-World immigrants are essential to shore-up the welfare state.

However, the now-waning West became great not because it was more populated than the rest of the world and outbred it. The West was great because of its human capital—innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs to allow its own people to recover.

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and thinker based in the US. Her weekly column was begun in Canada in 1999. (Articles Archive.) Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 2016) and Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank). Follow ilana on Twitter,  Gab, Facebook,
and subscribe to Ilana’s
YouTube channel.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel