Bill Clinton Stumps for Harris, Calls for More Immigration Because of “Low Birth Rates”

On the campaign trail Monday for Vice President Harris, former President Bill Clinton pointed to waning fertility rates as a pretext for more immigration. “We’ve got the lowest birth rate we have had in well over a hundred years,” Clinton told voters in Georgia. With the Harris-Walz logo right over his shoulder and while discussing immigration reform, he added, “We are not at replacement level, which means we have got to have somebody come here if we want to grow the economy.”

It was the latest in an ongoing debate over exactly how the U.S. population should grow. Democrats see more immigration as part of the fix, while Republicans favor cracking down on illegal immigration and boosting domestic birthrates. As Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance previously told RealClearPolitics, “I want more Americans.”

For his part, Clinton was right on the numbers: American women are giving birth at record-low rates. The total fertility rate has fallen to 1.62 births per woman, according to federal data, the lowest birthrate since the 1930s when the government began tracking the statistic.

Experts call it a “baby bust,” and lawmakers have taken notice.

The former president was echoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who warned two years ago that because the “population is not reproducing on its own,” the U.S. needed to provide “a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented there are here.” Like Clinton, Schumer said, “The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants.”  

The United States already welcomes far more immigrants than any other nation. Nearly a million lawful immigrants last year became citizens through the naturalization process. The number of migrants within the country illegally, meanwhile, has swelled. Around 11 million immigrants live and work within the U.S. illegally, according to most estimates.

The Harris campaign did not comment on the record when RCP asked about the former president’s prescription for boosting the economic growth by bringing in more immigrants. And Democrats have not focused on the waning birthrate to the same degree as Republicans who have introduced legislation with the express purpose of reversing the trend. All the same, Harris has unveiled a number of pro-family policies, most notably a $6,000 tax credit for new parents.

Conservatives point to the aging populations in Europe, and increasingly China, as cautionary examples. Fewer new Americans does not just mean less economic growth and a strained social safety net. Warned American-Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony, it spells a slow rolling national suicide. “It doesn’t matter how many immigrants you have,” he said at a national conservativism conference this summer. “If you are not having children, your nation is finished. America has now followed Europe in the inability to guarantee another generation of Americans.”

Vance subscribes to a similar “pronatalist” view, telling RCP this summer that he agrees with Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor turned Trump booster, who has often said that “population collapse, due to low birth rates, is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Ohio’s junior senator wants strict border security; he often promises that a second Trump presidency means massive deportations of illegal aliens. Vance also espouses a spate of pro-family policies, such as a $5,000 per child tax credit. While he earned widespread ire from the left for his comments about “childless cat ladies,” Vance has not abandoned his attacks on what he called the elitist idea from Democrats “that we just don’t need to support working families anymore.”

Niche debates over demographics were once the purview of tech moguls and policy wonks. Increasingly, they are part of the electoral conversation. Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of “Get Married,” credits Vance for furthering that discussion. He cautioned that Clinton’s prescription was shortsighted.

“There’s no question that the nation’s fertility rate stands at a record low. But what I don’t think President Clinton understands is that fertility is cratering across most of Latin America as well,” Wilcox told RCP. “Long term, if the United States aims to keep its population sustainable, it will have to make its public policies much more marriage and family friendly.”

Democrats have largely shied away from a conversation about boosting birthrates in light of the controversy over the “Great Replacement” theory. The Biden White House has condemned as xenophobic and racist the idea that foreign born immigrants are being welcomed into the U.S. in order to replace native-born citizens.

Wade Miller, executive director of the Trump-friendly group Renewing America, pointed to Clinton’s remarks and called the policies of the Biden-Harris administration “a manufactured replacement.” He argued that Democrats had pushed “degrowth policies that disincentivize having families, and then claim we need to import millions of people to grow the economy.”

The former president may have gotten out over his skis and run ahead of Harris on the birthrate question. He was recruited as a campaign surrogate during the final stretch but attracted unwanted attention from Republicans when he argued in Georgia that the death of nursing student Laken Riley “probably wouldn’t have happened” if illegal immigrants, including her alleged killer, had “all been properly vetted.”

Clinton was referring to a bipartisan border security bill that was scuttled by Republicans, with encouragement from Trump earlier this year. Riley’s attacker, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, entered the country illegally in 2022.

“If Bill Clinton cares about families, he should tell Kamala Harris to stop pushing policies that have driven up prices for groceries, childcare, and housing – making it unaffordable for Americans to have children,” RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement to RCP, adding that “Clinton is right about one thing: Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Laken Riley would be alive it were not for Kamala Harris’ open border.”

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.