Now policy experts analyze shifting demographic numbers in the u. S. And what they mean for the countrys future. The American Enterprise institute hosted this power and 20minute discussion. Good afternoon, everyone. Im going to get us started right on time here today since we have a lot to discuss. Its my privilege to welcome you to todays event. Demographic decline, National Crisis or moral panic here at the American Enterprise institute. Im ryan streeter, prikt director of policy studies. Im so glad to have a great panel and what i think will be an interesting discussion for you today. So, im going to introduce our panelists and moderator starting on the far right over here. Which is purely a positional statement with nick, the henry went chair and economist here at aei and he writes extensively on demographics. And he has a thing or two to say on north korea, so if things get slow, we can get into. Hes testified before congress on numerous occasions and has served a a consultant and adviser to various units of the u. S. Government. In 2012 nick was awarded the prestigious bradley prize. Next to him is phillip cohen, professor of sociology at the university of maryland. He has a lngstanding interest in gender, family and social change. In particular he has published extensively on the division of labor within families and men and women outside of families. In addition, hes maintained a strong interest in measurement issues and household and family structure. Phil, welcome to aei. And lyman stone is an adjunct at aei and fellow at the research for family studies. He blogs about migration, Population Dynamics and regional economics at his blog in a state of migration. He also writes regularly for voxs the big idea and for the federalist and his work has been extense sily covered in the new york times, the post, wall street simprournl other places. Our fearless moderator is carlin bowman, a senior fellow at aei where she analyzes American Public opinion ranging on social and economic topics. Shes commented on the evolution of american politics through the lens of key demographic and geographic changes. So, please join me today in welcoming our distinguished guests. Thank you very much, ryan. I would like to add our welcome to everyone here and our cspan audience. Demographic change has been much in the news in the last week. As you those of you who spent seven hours listening to the cnn debate on Climate Change heard a question from the audience, to bernie sanders, who was asked whether or not he would talk about the population explosion and its relationship toll Climate Change. He said, in fact, that would be part of his campaign. At the other end of the rhetorical spectrum, elon musk gave an interview on Artificial Intelligence and said the biggest threat to the world Going Forward was not the population explosion but demographic winter and population collapse. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between these two rehoer c rhetorical extreme. I think ten countries were below fertility rate. Were going to turn to lyman stone and each will speak for eight minutes and then, perhaps, ill ask a question if we have time and then well turn to all of your questions. Lets begin, lyman. All right. So, my question is, basically, we framed this as is it a National Crisis or a moral panic . Basically, is it a big deal . Is demographic decline or is it not . So, im going to argue, its a big deal. In fact, it is worse than you think. And the main way im going to do this is by comparing to, well, what do you think it is right now . My benchmark is the Census Bureau . What do they think is going to happen in their most recent population forecast. I could have shown you the congressional budget, trustees, any of these groups but theyre all very similar. The census says, growth continues, right . And it maybe slows down a little bit towards the middle of the century but this is basically business as usual scenario. So, shouldnt we just trust that, if thats what census says . Dont we know . Im going to argue that actually theyre wrong. The first reason theyre wrong is because they greatly overestimate births. Census forecast was published in 2017 but the most recent finalized data was 2017. We now have final 2017 and 2018 data. We can see how accurate they were the first two years. They were really inaccurate. They overestimated births by 220,000 babies. So, thats a lot. We can see the same thing in deaths. They underestimated deaths. So, a lot of this is about deaths of despair as theyre labeled, opioid, suicide, alcohol. They overestimated im sorry, they underestimated deaths considerably. Finally, on net migration, their error was much smaller but they did overestimate net migration in these years as well. When you correct for these errors, their 2018 population number versus their own 2018 estimates. They have an estimate sxm forecasting system. Theyre separate. Theyre 2018 population forecast was 724,000 people too high. Which is a larger error than is generally considered permissible, lets say, in a private forecasting market. So, if we correct for those errors, if we use the same assumptions about future trends and all this stuff and mortality and Life Expectancy change and we just change the intercept, just where we start from, the yellow line is what we get. 40 million less. Thats a meaningful decline in growth rates. So, you start saying, okay, right here, if i stop, weve kind of proved the point. The view of what is going to happen is wrong. Its too optimistic. Growth will be much lower than you might think. I want to tell you not only that but the estimations that guide that future trajectory are incorrect as well. So, we can look at different fertility assumptions. I have just the historic total fertility rate which is a bit of a concocted number but its basically if birth rates by age stayed consistent over a womans whole life span, how many babies would she have . This number is never quite accurate, right, because birth rates change but its a reasonable enough indicator. So we can see that blue line at the bottom with dots if the rates fall to 2. 4 births per woman and at the top, what if fertility rose to 2. 2, which is the highest it would have been since 1971. This should give us a lot of different population scenarios to work with. In the base scenario is assuming some fertility recovery over the next several decades. What we see is theres a 60 million person difference between the highest and lowest scenarios in 2070. That lowest fertility scenario actually gets you population decline by the middle of of the century, which i dont think most people are saying, yeah, by the 2050s, population will be declining. We just wont need this many houses. I dont think the Real Estate Market is planning for that. At the highest end, even if you assume this unrealistic increase in fertility, up to 2. 2, you still dont get to census own forecast. Their error was just too big. So, we can do similar then we can look at fertility by race. Its worth mentioning, a lot of times fertility when we talk about low fertility, like steve king said, we cant continue the culture with other peoples babies. Theres this dichotomy define our babies and other peoples babies. When i talk about declining, fertility, whats the line you see here . Its hispanic babies, hispanic mothers. Thats the big decline in fertility. If we look at achieved fertility versus desires, the biggest shortfalls are from the social survey, which i believe phil will also cite, basically the people with the biggest shortfall in fertility, theyre not nonwhite hispanic women. Its asianamerican women, native american women. If fertility is to increase in america it will be disproportionately white fer till. When we talk about, do we want fertility to rise, were talking about nonwhite fertility. White fertility has been pretty stable for a long time. Ultimately higher birth rates, more diversity. You can also do this out and the population model and see it pan out. Lets go to migration. We can look at different migration scenarios. What if migration falls, if it rises. It has been rising. Theres a 40 million person population difference. Its a big difference. Even that high scenario where immigration rises by a third, which should be a big change, doesnt get you to the census current forecast. We can look at deaths. One way to express death is Life Expectancy. We can say, what if recently Life Expectancy has been falling because of deaths of despair. What if we get bad at deaths of despair . What if our Health System gets more and more dysfunctional or if we get Good Technology and deal with deaths despair, what effect does it have . Its huge. The only way to get to census current forecast is to assume that Life Expectancy is going to rise considerably. However, while that might sound like a rosy scenario, we can look at the population share by age. Yeah, we have a lot of people in that scenario. Very few of them are working age. Great, population growth, maybe thats lovely but there will be problems associated with that as well, which means really fertility and immigration are your two channels for population growth with a more stable age mix. You can see that with all the other lines in the middle. They dont change the age line much. Whats really going to happen . Ive given you all these scenarios. Ive talked very quickly with lots of graphs. So, first we can think about immigration. What is actually likely to happen . Fertility rates are declining in the countries that have historically sent immigrants to america. Mexico, much of latin america, east asia is developing very rapidly. The push for migration is less there as well. India is below rate. Africas fertility rate is declining as well and we dont get a lot of immigrants from africa yet, unfortunately. Meanwhile, there are more rich countries opening to migration. The foreignborn share of population in europe is rising very rapidly. Its also rising in japan. Its rising in korea. More and more developed countries say were aging. We want to offset this with immigration, which is a reasonable strategy but it gets harder as global fertility rates decline and the number of potential destinations rises. At some point this gets more and more challenging. Finally, theres a u. S. Policy question. Can we count on immigration policy remaining open and stable forever . I think most of us know the answer is no. As much as i personally would very much like that, i would like a lot more immigration, its unlikely that our policy mix will be perpetually open to high levels of immigration as we can see in current changes right now. With fertility, its a bit less concrete. We can say cost of child bearing is rising, the opportunity cost of child bearing is rising in terms of lost wages and time out of work. Theres also this question of these ultralow fertility rates. Im calling it european asian. Will we drift into a new paradigm where people only want one kid . Were not there. Maybe we will get there. With mortality, heres a real case of pessimism. Thats usually my attitude. Deaths of despair are not declining and were not really pioneering a way to deal with this. Were seeing a geographic spread in many large parts of the country still have very low parts of death in these areas, which means theres a lot of upside potential for deaths of despair. Whats going to happen . It will be worse than you thought. It will be worse than any of our forecasting agencies will be expecting. All of our longterm Budget Planning is wildly optimistic in terms of whats going to happen with population. I would say thank you, however that is a dark note to end on but it is where im ending. Say youre welcome. Youre welcome. Youre welcome. Perfect segue. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here. And participate in this conversation. I actually will have some of my own projection graphs also, which will be simpler, but ill make a couple of political points. First i have to advance it on here so i can have my notes. Theres a lot of sort of on the in the in the american right theres a lot of mumbo jumbo about a demographic decline with the sort of mystical statements like, the health of the nation is measured by whether or not were having thats not a measurable theres no health of the nation. So, you might think that places with higher birth rates are better off than places with lower birth rates. Thats totally wrong. So, it sort of has this kind of it has this sort of emotional charge to it. And, you know, you might think theres nothing really wrong with just making, you know, in all statements children are good or whatever, but in the case of america, these throwaway lines that are not associated with real numbers and measures and so on have real consequences. This is from the guy who shot up the mosques in new zealand. Birth rates, birth rates, birth rates. We have to get the birth rates to change. No matter what we do, this is the number one thing. So the demographic decline falls to White Supremacists a lot. In the same way state rights appeal to states, you might be able to make a nonracist argument about it but cant sort of ignore the coincidence that a lot of the racists really like what youre saying. So its i mean, you can, but its kind im suggesting its kind of irresponsible. We have to deal with that association between this idea of demographic decline and the political implications of it. And theyre not so hard to imagine. This is the census forecast. The scale here may be off, but the gist of it is that the white population is pretty much there or is going to increase a little more. This starts in 1970. I noticed, by the way, lymans graph started in 1800, which gives you a i like the longtime series. But it kind of throws off the way you look at the current situation. Or at least you just have to keep it in mind. If you are concerned about the composition of the u. S. Population from a racist perspective, theres a lot of material to work with here basically in the projections. And in the future where were heading. I want to suggest, though, that as an actual problem of demographic decline, its really the solution is really right in front of us, which is immigration. And if people dont like it or its politically not feasible, whatever, then thats the problem. The problem is not the lack of people. The problem is the lack of wanting to let people into the country. And if the problem is you want a certain kind of people and its a cultural problem and youre worried about who is going to come and so on, then essentially now youre even now its even harder to disassociate yourself with the racist perspective, so good luck. When you look at the longer term composition of immigrants, you can see what why theres a political problem especially on the racist right with immigration, which is the composition of immigrants which is the great majority is from latin america and asia, increasing but very small share from africa. The question of, is this is immigration good is very different from the question of or what is the correct immigration policy from the question of, is immigration policy good for america or good for us as opposed to them or Something Like that. Im not a politician. Im not elected to represent an american constituency or something so i dont have to set my moral horizon arbitrarily to end at the u. S. Border. I think a lot of people want to come here. Immigration is good for them. Thats good. America may have issues to work out with that. I wish america luck. Im happy to help. Its not a moral given that the issue we have to do is figure out how to make this good for america. I just want to make that point, just to be preachy. Now, a little of more demography. I think the fear is overblown. Even if you take everything lyman said that were not going to meet the census projections and that may have big implications for the budget planni planning, but population decline is a long way off. Demographic decline is really a scary, madeup term. Were not having population decline any time soon. When people say demographic decline they often include things like, well, we had a little decline unprecedented and completely terrible. Little decline in Life Expectancy and the birth rate is falling, therefore, we have demographic decline. Keep it in perspective were not talking about population decline italy, spain, germany, france and the United Kingdom go to blow placement fertility in the 1970s and their population is not declining italy a tiny bit. If they dont have immigration, it will happen. Thats what the replacement means. It doesnt mean decline right now. These are birth cohorts and its their completed fertility, cumulative fertility. I hope you can see. Oh, thats nice and big. The darkest line is the people born, the women born in 1960, they got to just about two births per woman by the time they got to 45. The next cohort five years later had a little more. The 1970 cohort got up a little bit higher. The 1975 cohort higher still and its really after that that we start to have this issue. If you look look at that line thats squeaking up in between there. Thats the first bunch of socalled millenials, a term i dont use scientifically but just for reference. People born around 1980. If you parse out those lines, they started out lower and then caught up a little. Now theyre actually ahead of the 65 and 60 generation at that time in their life. So, you can see essentially whats happening with them is some evidence of delay and catch up. Were in the range of one to two babies per woman. Catching up in your 30s is not impossible at all. If were talking about the difference between six and two, then catchup becomes a biological issue. Those two lines is whats troubling lyman is theyre well below the previous cohorts. The unknown question is if they turn the corner like a hurricane, so to speak, and start and the projection ends of tracking them further north, then well never get a cohort that doesnt replace itself. We have never had a cohort of women that did not replace themselves. A couple of projections. Im probably running late on time. Your fine. Take your time. A couple of projections. These are not census projections. Although i use their projection tool, which is excellent. If you go to my blog family inequality, ill put it up tomorrow. You can play with these numbers yourself. So, the line that heads down is if you take just todays birth rates and todays death rates and nothing else and just run those numbers, then we would lose 100 Million People by the end of the century in terms of total population. Thats sort of thats the disaster scenario thats very bad. However, if you just add the current level of migration, if you just take the census numbers, not their estimate not their projections but estimates by section, and plug them in, if we have 1 Million Immigrants per year that solveds the problem of declining population. And it reduces the percentage of the population that is old by the end of the century, you can see from 25. It does a little on aging and stops the population decline. That america will look pretty different. You might want to think about that. That previous one, those orange lines, which are still there, assumes no increase in mortality. Im not assuming a decrease, a crash in mortality either, but that just assumes mortality goes on the way it is. If i had a little trouble with the software so i just plugged in japan, current and japan for the u. S. In 2080. We can dream we have japans Life Expectancy, what they have now by 2080. If we get there, both numbers rise a little. Finally, i did do i didnt do lymans disaster scenario of total fertility falling down to 1. 4, but if you let it fall to 1. 6, either by 2030 or 2050, it doesnt make that much of a difference in the light of the increasing Life Expectancy and immigration. So, im not seeing the disaster in terms of total numbers basically any time soon. You can go back to worrying about the climate. I want to point out i like to show this one, although this one is informative but it doesnt show you everything. These are not birth rates, these are changes in birth rates by age since 1989. I want to put this in perspective. So, the dark lines are the the darkest line there, 15 to 17yearolds and the next one 18 to 19. Basically fertility is falling for younger women and rising for older women on percentage basis. Of course, those numbers in the 40 to 44 are still quite low. The percentage rise has been very rapid. So, basically our whole fertility regime is shifting from earlier birth to later birth. People talk like the teen birth rate is its own thing. We monitor the teen birth rate. Is it up or down . Its down. Its all part of, these are the same women. Theres one trend which is rising age of birth. This is mostly been good. This is mostly because women have more opportunities. So, theyve been doing other things instead of having children and its mostly good for those children. It also comes with later marriage which is associated with lower odds of divorce and other Better Outcomes for children. So, the idea that if you start mucking around with fertility, it has to come in here somewhere. Where are you going to get those more by the ways if we want to raise fertility . I assume nobody wants more births under age 20. No one in respectable policy circles. Cant be those. People start getting nervous at the higher ages. You have to realize youre talking about now the age of increasing birth rates for the group of women who have who are taking advantage of the improvements for women that we have had in terms of education and career and so on. So, women mostly want this and its mostly been good. However, it is true, and this is the General Social survey data, that there is an increasing share of people who when they reach age 40, if you ask them how many children have you had, and then you ask them separately, what is your idea what do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have . You get about 25 of people who that ideal number they give you is higher than the number they had. This absolutely does not mean that something has gone wrong in their lives. Other things may have gone so great that they put that one ideal aside, right . So or if you treat children as a luxury, you can put it in the category, how many boats do you think everybody should have . I think everybody should have one at least. I have none and i probably never will, but that doesnt mean my life is a failure. It means i have things i didnt achieve that i sort of hoped i would achieve. So, its we just have to if you really want to study the question of are people not is there something going wrong in peoples lives . That would be concerning in a different way than the question of the Economic Health of the country and the future and so on. Does this indicate sort of in the j. D. Vance way that something troubling with our society . People arent having the number of children they want to have. That would be a problem. But i dont think this necessarily shows it. And so wed have to look at the choices that people actually made in order to understand whether or not the tradeoffs were overall advantageous. Ill make a couple of wrapup points. What is the prospect of sort of pro nalgts policy in the United States . Its not very good. And the reason is because its very hard to design a policy that you could here, im not a political expert, but its hard to makepronatal policy thats not going to be wrong. You cant really its hard to design a pronatal policy thats not going to make more poor women and women of color have more children and thats not what they have in mind. I dont really see it really in the cards, which is one of the reasons why i think the political talk about demographic decline and sort of the the crisis atmosphere is bad because i dont think it leads to a positive policy outcome but i think it inflames the racist right and thats a shame. A quick other number two. If youre trying to is it social engineering . I thought have conservatives were against social engineering. People are choosing how many people they want to have. Isnt that good . You know, when poor women were trying to have children that the american right didnt think they could afford to have, they were very comfortable punishing them by taking away their welfare. And the rich women want to have children that nobody else can have, then it is a National Crisis to not achieving fertility, and thwe dont have go in this direction, but if we trying to help women reach their fertility goals and we want families to have the number of children they want to have, because that is what for a good society does and what Healthy People do and a government does that is supporting the people, then i think it is really great and it is a shame that some of the people who hold that position are prevented by the deeply held moral and religious convictions as they do for poorer women have more children. So that is the tan gegent and i done. Thanks. So, nick. I am going to try to make three points. Point number one of the i were able really accurately and really robustly to forecast future fertility trends for the United States and future Immigration Trends for the United States, we wouldnt be meeting in this lovely auditorium, but we would be meeting on my palazzo or my 400foot yacht, but there is a reason that these projections have always been errorprone, and the reasons are that there is no robust or reliable method yet as long as human beings have volition for longterm forecasts of the fertility trends. It is just the same. Actually, it is worse with the immigration trend, because they are so intrinsically political. So, i dont know if we going to reach a peak americans in the next generation, i dont know if we are going to have the west population shrink or reaccelerate and i just dont know. The second thing however is that in this world of necessary ignorance that i have been very skeptical for, you know, all of my career in the scare stories about the population explosion, and im also pretty skeptical about population decline as being a necessary catastrophe for societies. My view is that population change is a form of social change, and some places deal with social change better than other places. If you have prepared and relatively intelligent policies, you can deal with social change better than if you dont. That is going to get us to kind of the question of where the west may be heading. And so my third point is this, i can imagine a future for the United States where total population is shrinking and where Overall Society is graying and median age is increasing and the proportion of the people over 65 or whatever you call old is rising and the society is becoming increasingly prosperous, and where it coincides with the older populations, but we are not on this path right now. We are on a worrisome path should we ever hit this population shrinking inflection point, and certainly, it is a troubling path considering the gradual social ageing that is occurring in all of the affluent societies. I will show you what i mean here. So, number one. For a shrinking and aging society to prosper, you need to have high rates of Labor Force Participation. I am looking at the situation with guys in the u. S. Now. The situation with women is a little bit better, but not a whole lot better. Last weeks job report showed that the employment to population ratios for the guys 25 to 54 or if you like 20 to 64 bet e it does no matter which you choose, but it is about the same as reported in the 1940 u. S. Census, and the census was asking people a question about the Previous Year which was 1939. So we are basically at about 1939 levels of employment rates for at least the guys and not what you would want if you were about to head into the shrinking and aging land. So we can look closer at this, and say that maybe this is a problem of the lack of demand for jobs and so forth, and this is certainly you could make that argument after the great recession. But we have had a study increase in the number of Unfilled Positions in the u. S. And not old for Hedge Fund Managers and chemical engineers. A million of those jobs are for the people in the leisure industry, hotel, restaurateurs, and con strstruction workers anu dont have to be of an age, but healthy. And so this has not moved since the crash itself, but there is something going on here that doesnt look so good especially in the prospect of the aging and prosperous society. And so that is not what we see right now with the mortality trends for the conventionally defined aging working population. We have just lost a decade of the Health Progress in United States, and this is only up to 2017. And so it was warned that it is not so hot, and now we are on the other end of the jend of the curve. Thats not going to work either. Education, and this is the portion of the 20 somethings in the u. S. From the 60s to now who have bachelors degrees or higher. And notice again what has happened with the guys. The proportion of the guys with bachelor degrees in thes is actually lower than say in 2010 than it was in the 1970s. Part and parcel of preparing for a Healthy Aging society is increasing Educational Attainment, and it would be nice if people learned things, too, while they were in school and increasing the Educational Attainment, and youl would see a sine quo none, and that is also another issue immigration. I would say pretty far immigration has been a good thing for the u. S. And american newcomers have been assimilated into loyal and productive new americans and of course not perfect, but you have to say compared to other thing, it is good. And phil, you may disagree with me about this, but what you will see in europe is not what i want to see in the u. S. These are, this is what is going on more or less in the eu, and what i am showing you here is three lines showing the proportion of younger people who are neither employed nor in education or training and the lowest line in the eu countries are far for the nativeborn eu 28 people, and then a slightly higher line for the i guess other eu people, and then the highest line of all are people who were born elsewhere outside of the eu. When i see this, this is looking to me like people are not assimilating into the, you know, into the Human Capital that these societies need for the future. Now i would say that so far we have dodged this bullet, and i hope that we will continue to dodge this bullet, but i dont have any sense of complacency or the hubris of thinking that we can do it permanently. Thank you very much, nick, and thank you all for this thoughtful presentation. We have been discussing immigration and i would like to know if you disagree with nick about the last point of the problems of assimilation or return to immigration . I was trying to lay, overlay from the memory what that looks like in the u. S. I dont tt they we have the casf the immigrants being twice the unemployment rate. No, the Labor Participation is higher in any ethnic group. I dont know enough about europe to read this graph, but i suspect they dont know what is going on with that. Gender would be an issue would be my first cut on that. But for what happens to the perceiving society when you have a lot of immigration is a very big question. Also what happens to the immigrants. I sort of, you know, in one sense if you reduce the border to basically a checkpoint where you check for arrest warrants and otherwise let people in, a lot of people would come and they would come until coming was not good anymore, and then not better. So i used to think about this in terms of the u. S. And mexico when most of the undocumented immigration was from mexico, and if you combine the u. S. And mexican populations and read around the borders of both countries, the average income for the u. S. Would be lower and mexican area would be higher and eventually even out. I think that is basically fine. I think that the issue is do you have some, and is besides our own selfinterests, and people care about that, is there something very special about america that must be preserved that would be at risk from people who didnt share the cultural background and coming here in large numbers. You know, i admit that is an open question. I think it could also go to other way, and you could end up with, you know, in the net positive in terms of the culture change of course. If that is the answer to your question. Large countries are clearly competing for immigrants and you have all alluded to it. It is like a silent action, because are we really competing for immigrants . Point well taked. What does the u. S. Immigration policy look like and this is one of my area in the world where on the public polls we see deeper disagreement. A new poll this morning from the Chicago Council that shows that 79 or, 78 of the republicans said that large number of immigrants, refugees represent a critical issue towards the u. S. , and so what should this immigration policy look like . Do you want to start . It is a big one. I think that when i look at this graph that is up here right now, i wonder if it looked different in 1999, and what i mean by that is or in, you know, 2004 or in some prior period that is i wonder how much in the u. S. , we are fortunate that most of the immigration is coming essentially as labor immigration, and we say that, you know, you are either here for education or you are here for work, and even if you come on a family visa, the Family Member came for work, and often they are motivated to get you into the work as well and also, we have a generous support system, and that is historically true for european immigration. There recently, it has not been. Europe changed from a country, or continent really that accepted in total Something Like 1 5 or 1 6 crisis migrants as we did and one thatk accepted 12 times as many. Historically, it was the u. S. Who accepted a lot of refugees and Asylum Seekers and then of course, the crisis in syria and afghanistan changed all of that and they didnt know how to handle that. They didnt have a lot of experience with the refugee resettlement, and lot of difficult experimentation, and at the same time Asylum Seekers are by definition attempting to be temporary, and how much of what we see with the european Employment Trends is people who intend this to be temporary in a crisis, and also a lot of them dont have birthright citizenship which we have in the United States and how many of these are stateless and cant acquire employment, and so we have institutions that promote employment in america, and that immigration point is the point, and whatever the policy, and also total numbers. And im a demographer and i care about the numbers and important for forecast, but they are important for the community that receives them. If we are getting 2 Million Immigrants into new york city, and they are all french people, this is going to have a different, you know, frankly, a different political response than if each town gets two or three more immigrants and they are all from different countries, because these are the different political impacts, and different economic impacts, and getting people to have the immigration policy encourages people to have a stake in immigration, and i appreciated that philip mentioned the great replacement conspiracy theory, and all too often and especially on the right, there is a rhetoric that the immigrants are replacement. We should be trying to find the policy avenues to help people view them as reinforcements and this is additional people contributing to the society and the culture and our institutions do not do that right now, and you can think about the placebased visas or the sponsorship visas which are all options for, that and you have a system to encourage a welcoming community into facilitation. And nick, a better immigration policy . Well, first for phils question, if you, it is more extreme for females than males, and holds up for the males as well. At least with Labor Force Participation and i cant say about the education and training part of it. Yes, it is certainly true that 95 of the planet would be financially better off if they moved to the usa. But the people who ultimately get to choose on who comes into any country or the national serenity, and it is like the voters. We had a very, very low level of immigration in 1920s to the 1960s in the United States, and there is a reason for that, and the reason is what happened in the first gilded age in the United States in the 1880s and the 1890s and 1900s when we really did have, and not totally open borders, because it was hard and expensive and dangerous to get here, but we had pretty much open immigration policies. We saw extremely big wealth differences and income differences developed in the United States, and does any of this sound familiar . Then among less skilled nativeborn americans whose wages were arguably being depressed by left skilled immigrants coming in, there was a huge antiimmigrant movement that started in the 1890s and continued into 1900s and started in different statehouses all across the u. S. , and got a couple of bills to congress that didnt pass. And then we had a forcing event and that is world war i when people couldnt move anymore, and after that, we had a really radical restrictive policy go into place. I would kind of like maybe a parado malibu guy that would like to see that there are no winners or losers, but maybe there are no losers in the immigration setting. You dont want to be a politician, but maybe it works already. And so i dont know what the totals are or what the flow is, but i dont think it is out of bounds for people who think that their interests are being heard to raise their hands and say that we have a political process that is supposed to protect us, too. And philip, your reaction . I had something brief about that. It is interesting that extreme part san split is that i am skeptical of polls that go by the part sandy vid now, because at least according to trump 94 of the republicans support him, which makes me think that the selfidentification is tied up with trump so essentially what you have, if it is true, you polled a group of members of the antiimmigration movement about what their views of antiimmigration are, and so i think that is a problem. I think that lymans point of communities and reception is well taken, and gos es to your point, nick, too, as the point of making immigration sort of senders and receivers. So it is interesting that i think that we could think about japan a little. Maybe japan is having a proportional increase, but it is small, and it is not enough to address the population, and i will let you answer that in a second. I just have this rhetorical. So if you are having a demographic crisis from the low fertility and having all of the problems with the demographic decline, stagnation, and entrepreneurship and the ing thises that we are afraid of and you refuse to allow the immigrants in to help with that problem, then immigration is not really a problem. Then the problem is something cultural in the society which refuses you to allow you to see the humanity in your neighbors in some vital way. I think that it is, a key part of the problem is to work on that problem which is before we can get to a sane immigration policy, we may have to get to the point where americans can recognize the humanity in the neighbors. Lyman, do you have a response to that . I will leave the japan one, because i dont know the stalts o off of the top of my head, but there is a sense that going back to the tweet heard around the world with steve king and this other comment, it triggered something, and this idea that is latent with some people that there is a substitution between our babies and their babies, and that there is a rival. So we see it at the impetus of seeing these as rivals, because the growth can come from one another. And practically speaking, the first wave of successful nativism to happen was coincident with the first time in American History that mortality adjusted fertility to 2. 9, and it excelled to below 1. 0. So it had been declining gradually, but with child mortality. When people feel like their community is not going to survive, when people feel that it is threatened whether by suicide or opioids or ginggas khan, then it is a legitimate threat and people feel it. So a vital part of creating a welcoming society for immigrants is fertility among the people who live there. That is saying, look, your community is not under threat. You are having a future for your culture, and you are going to hit the scale to keep supporting the seminary and the school and the Soccer League and whatever you value, but this other community is going to join you and share these thing, and one of my big worries with the low fertility is with the declining fertility is that we are going to have a society where 100 of the population growth comes from immigration, and natives are aware of that. That is, they will say, yeah, we are not okay with this. Our community ispersisting, and people want to feel as a transcending and continuing community. So we want the fertility rate to rise, because we want marriage between the natives and the foreignborn and we want communities to welcome people into a healthy and growing community. This is part of the welcoming community is the community that also values what it has to share with people who are coming. So, looking at the problems of the low fertility and the societies, they cant no innovate and they cannot sustain Social Security or project power, because they dont have enough money to spend on defense, and are those really, a lot of evidence on those points . No. Those are the things that people worry about. And Social Security and old age support is very bishg, and one the things in lymans scenario would matter if people having children wanted immigrants to help take care of their children. So the care issues are very real. The issues of the cultural vitality and all of that stuff, i am not sure if they are not sure if they have the record to evaluate that. And i dont have that projecting power. It is not my thing. And one of the arguments is well, i know it, but i dont want to judge. About the problems of the low fertility societies that we have not touched on . What is that . Are there other issues about low fertility that we have not touched on . In japan, and one of things that we did not look at is head counts. This is like your thing, the family arrangements, right. You have a not just a change in the head count in japan and china, but you have radically changing family and living arrangements. I mean, the projections that i have seen, and maybe you have seen other ones suggest that japan is on a path to seeing current cohort of 20somethings mainly end up without grandchildren. How a society like that of future japan will function, and that is getting into the Science Fiction part of the program, because i am not imaginative enough to know how that is going to work, and so not only the head count, but the living arraignments, and the family structure, too. I think that i read that the people in japan are actually renting children for just being with them on the weekends, because they have so many people who are single and so many people who are alone for these reasons. I wanted to touch upon the depths of despair, and you have all allowed to it, and i know that senator lees Capital Project tried to break down some of the statistics and viewing suicide and alcohol deaths are not significantly different than what they were in the last century, and that the opioid addiction and drug addiction is soaring, and so how do we address the depths of despair on that. I know it is a very big question. Anybody want to take that firs first . One of my hobbies for a long time was looking at Health Trends in the soviet union and the other warsaw pact countries, and the stuff that we see today looks a little bit too close for comfort to have kind of an echo for the rising adult mortality trends that we saw of back in those societies then, and i never thought that i would live long enough to see Life Expectancy higher in east germany than Life Expectancy in the United States, but here we are today. So if you are thinking that you can look at that stuff as the sort of mirror that is reflecting something on where we are and there are many ways that it cannot, because it is a completely different political arrangement, and many other things as well. One of the things that i think that the Public Health community missed is the role of stress and psychosocial factors in that longterm health problem, and in part, because it was something that nobody was measuring. I have to wonder whether that isnt also part of what we are seeing here in the United States. We should have a much more responsive public Health System, but in a way, it is kind of astonishing to me that it took a decade and a half for american researchers, and Life Science Community to realize that the low education middle aged anglos were having this rise in the death rates and it does not sound like that group is terribly well protected. One final question before we turn to your questions is what pro natal policies have worked elsewhere such as birth bonuses or tax incentives . I will take it. There a little bit of experience with that. And the problem is that you may be changing timing and encouraging people to have their second or third child sooner and some combination of the child credits and paid leave and education and so on. And among the things that would mostly like, i dont know that, you know, the history of the countries tinkering with the fertility rates is not very good. It is hard to do that with in the free society, but, you know, if if as long as we are talking about the depths of despair, if people were happier and healthier, and you know, if we just imposed a participatory tax. Just over the border. They would probably have more children and not pro natal policy, but improving peoples outlook. And to speak into the sense of the pro natalism here, and most of what we have observed from the baby bonuses and these types of things is the timing effect. It is people shifting of having a baby from 29 to 25. However, as anyone who has done any demographic forecasting is aware, timing effects matter in terms of the age of the population, and the rate of the growth of the population, and if you can shrink the generational space by three or four years, this is actually a lot of population growth, and in fact, the trustees and Social Security fund actually include a scenario where they just look at changing the median age and it turns out to make a lot of money for Social Security if we have the same amount of kids if we have them ever so slightly. Great. Get a timing effect. And so this is good especially to be paying people for, and i agree with the concerns of tinkerring with the fertility policy, and in a nasty space quickly in a lot of cases, but what we are talking about is policy to reduce Child Poverty by 95 , and handing the familys a bunch of cash basically. This is not a bad thing. And if it also compresses the generational space slightly and reduces the gap between the children that women have, that they say they want to have and if there is some research and a little bit of the cohort effect. It is not big, but particularly some research in canada found a bit of the cohort effect, and one in germany as well if we increase total child bearing a little bit, great. Will a cash bonus do everything . No. I am sympathetic to the view of the depths of the despair and making a Livable Society is part of this. Having a functional system is part of this, and there are some co compensatory policies, but some of these that is great word compensatory. So it cost them some money, and if you would like to have birthrates in a world where they want lots of thing, you have to pay for it. But it is a viable policy option combined with higher leverage points like removing the working class marriage penalties that are baked into the tax code and the welfare system, and working class families can save 5, 10, 15,000 penalties because of the benefits they lose. So no surprise that the marriage rates are falling. And so, looking at the fertility levels and you can correlate like anything with this, and they are always these maddening exceptions to the rule. The one that i find most persuasive is wanted fertility levels. What women want, and what we have just saw, it is not a perfect indicator, but it is a lot closer than other ones, and it is going to make a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. If that is true, and the most important determinant is desired fertility, then we can ask all sorts of questions about what effects are desired for fertility, and then we are all in the big area of investigation and research, but if that is true, yes, maybe pronatal policy, and voluntary pronatal policy could have some influence, but my impression is that even though it is a nonzero impact, it can be pretty expensive for the pretty modest demographic impact. Panel has covered an enormous amount of ground in a short time. So now we want to turn to your questions, and if you could wait for the microphone and identify yourselves, please. The first question, yes, right here. Good afternoon. David jimenez of the policy fellowship, and i dont want to throw gasoline on the fire here, but is there any policy of the socall socalled model that would impact the fertility rates in the United States . You are closer to that you meaning breadwinner and homemaker . Can you tell us about it. A family wage paid to support a family with one paid worker who is the man. Did the decline of that model have to do with the falli ining fertility, probably. Would bringing it back raise fertility, and a, you wont find out, and b, i dont think so. Actually there is efforts, and there have been efforts from this direction in some of the Southeast Asian country, because they had a theory, and now they have gone with a new theory, but for a while the near i have that basically, we have to make sure that we have well paid salarymen, and the word salaryman comes from the context of generally japan, because it will support families, but it does not work. The reason why, and this is going to surprise a lot of people, but the reason that women work is because they want to work. They have career ambition, and you cant pay the male breadwinner enough that those ambitions just dont exist. So you have a situation of the high occupational closure of who can work, and those who want to, so you will get inconsistent and unstable bad jobs that dont support the families and a few people who make it big. And actually in the japan case, because the family structure, my and practices within the families of extreme gender and differentiation and women not working and because women didnt want that, i think that it contributed a lot to the increasing age of marriage. In other words, that moment when you got married was basically the end. You put it off as long as you could and the policy in that case was not increasing fertility, but decreasing the fertility, and im exaggerating, because it signaled extreme gender inequality, and the women did not want to enter into that. And if you are looking at the total fertility rates in the u. S. , and this is theory and not cohort, and so little bit cheating. But if you are looking at the period rates from the mid80s until the crash of 08, it was scooting or a little above 2. 0, and as you pointed out, lyman, a differentiation of latino and everybody else, and that has come down, but the appreciable drop that we have seen, and the end of the american demographic exceptionalism or whatever you want to kalcall it, it was not timed with the fordism, but timed with the crash. For a considerable period of time, i was not clear if it is postponing or whether it is a new norm. It is harder and harder after 10plus years it is postponing, because if you postpone long enough then you forego. Other questions. Yes, in the back. I am santiago. I work here. And are there any other impacts on the rising infertility rates, and couples are raising out of the cities to get to the suburbs to make more money, and it is a huge financial cost to do so the usda does this report the look at the cost of raising a child, and it is what families spend and then allocate it to the child. If you looking at the categories out like housing, health care and child care and all of these things in the last 20 years and then compare it to the Consumer Price index, and pretty much in every category what happened is that the prices are risen, and the spending risen by wayer mo, and the families with materially better spending for their children except in housing. Where the spending has increased than the cost of housing. So families are having a real crunch, and so what we are actually seeing is families with a severe housing stress, and the real housing consumption is declining and now the Square Footage of housing is falling and has been for 15 years. Beyond this, the commute times are rising even as more people are working from home, and that is suggesting that people are living farther and farther from work, and having more and more miserable times in the traffic jams, and so this is suggesting a real housing stress impacting families, and so you really need the density to allow the people to live close the work, and close to amenities, and that is going to be removing barriers to that, and whether they are for mall zoning or they are just use rules or in many cases the building codes that make certain areas unbuildable, even though there is technology, and it is very important. Other questions . No. Sorry, michael. You wait for the microphone, and michael. Michael barrone with aei and Washington Examiner and i did not hear too much about where the future immigrants are going to come from. What we have seen over the last ten years is that we have moved towards what President Trump says he is for which is more high skilled and less lowskill immigration and what the democrats normally say that they are for, and that is sort of happened, because latin immigration in particular from mexico and also otherwise has gone way down hill. We are going beginning to get more high skilled immigration from the east and south asia, and what about africa . Lyman has it on the graphs a little bit. There are some parts of africa where the population growth is not declining very much, and you have a reservoir of 160 Million People in nigeria, and the immigrants that we are getting from africa, my understanding is pretty high skilled. Pretty high education, nigeria and ghana, and except for where we are getting the refugees like somalia, and we dont have too many ethiopians there, and so will we see a surge from africa and what are the consequences positive and negative from that . I have no idea. I mean, sub Saharan Africa is the only area of the world that is very much above net replacement and barring some sort of unimaginable catastrophe, that is not going to change over the next generation, so there is an increasing share like most of 45 maybe of the prospective conventionally defined working age manpower for the world as a whole is coming from the sub saharan, and a lot of people from that region who are going to be relatively high skilled, potential migrants around the world, even though there is a terrible education crisis under way for the subissahara as a whole. And the advancement of the Educational Attainment for the region is not increasing as fast as whole lot of us would like. And improved Educational Attainment there wins on its own merits for what it does there, but it seems like a reasonable conjecture to imagine that there are more high skilled migrants globally in the sub saharan region, and easier to head to europe . Maybe. But we have had a pretty good track record with the african migrants in the United States since 65. You will probably get more african migrants in the future which is great, because as mentioned, they have some of the best integration observed integration records in terms of speed of the employment, and the education converges, and their children do quite well here. With the literally the one exception being some somali communities where there were issues of the resettlement programs in some cases that go back many decades. I dont think that it is going to be a huge surge, because there is only a couple of ways to get here which is visa, and the african male class is growing, but not fast enough and educationally enough to produce enough admissions into the american universities. Work visa which is difficult to get if you dont have a network already. Not a lot of companies say, hey, lets send a recruiter to nigeria, and maybe they should, but it is not happening right now. Or refugee migration, but actually more and more african countries are effectively managing the crises locally which is wonderful, but it is actually fewer less resettlements made from some of the countries. And then you will get the fourth channel, and there no land border, and obviously the maritime aside from a few container smuggling situations, you not going to get mass migration there. And so i just dont think that, i wish there was a serious effort to recruit the next generation of americans in sub Saharan Africa, and it is smart besides what it would do for us in a region that china is competing in, but that is not why we are doing it to establish a visa program to establish a recruitment of sub Saharan Africans, and that is not where we are right now. And now, lets put two questions on the table, the one in the back and this one right here. Amy mccuin, im a financial analyst. I am curious that someone briefly mentioned the High Net Worth and the reproduction rate. I dont see that presented anywhere, because i see larger net worth families and low net worth families, and suggesting that the High Net Worth families have not adjusted the way that other groups have, and im curious about what that statistic looks like. And if we could get this question, too. Conrad. All right. I was going to say Conrad Hackett from the Pew Research Centers with thoughts. Okay. My name is francis and i work at the legislative center for liberty. And to follow up on the breadwinner, and the homemaker question earlier, it seems anecdotally there are a lot more Flexible Working arrangements and Maternity Leave that were not in place when women first entered the workforce and i wonder if in the decline of the women in the workforce might have reversed after more arrangements like that to give women more options. Did i overlook someone . Conrad right there. Conrad hackett, pew research center. My question is that given the demographic change makes people worry, do you think that the American Public would be better served by having a more complete understanding of the dynamics that you have talked about, or is ignorance bliss and they dont understand the change under way . Any of you can take any of those questions. I dont know the answer to the High Net Worth question. The only survey that would get at it is the survey of income participation, and it is a data set they dont touch with a ninefoot pole, because it is complicated to use and the other surveys wont hit that group of people very well, and jegeneral wealthy people have higher fertility because think can achieve it and reach their desired fertility. Is ignorance better question. I think that the panic about the immigration right now is greater than the panic about demographic declines. I kind of feel like, im an educator and it would be better if people understood the true story and this is going to have to include the story of immigration and what it is and who the immigrants are, and their, and what it means to them, and what it means for americans when they come here. I do think that, i mean, obviously, no one is going to advocate for ignorance, but i think that to get back to first point that i made, we have to really consider how everything that we say can be taken out of context. And we are not responsible for that, but especially for those for whom that happens all of time, and we owe to pay back a little bit of the explanation and resisting that stuff so that at least even if we cant prevent it from happening, and for this information from being used for nefarious purposes at least we can help to combat it after the fact. And with demographic education, it wins on its merits, but it is not demographics 101 and explaining what fertility means and immortality means, and immigration and how the arithmetic works and thatd be great if we could get that far, but it is also looking at our own demographics and not leaving things to hide in plain sight. I mean, we have got 20 million maybe invisible felons behinds bars, because we dont bother to count people with that status, and we have a problem of stagnating educational levels which we dont bother to, you know, talk about or even ask about why it is happening. We have a problem of the men without work thing that i was trying to get at which is more or less outside of the policy discussion for almost two generations. So, we can do more by going through the abcs, but also better work about what is happening in the society and maybe that is going to reduce some of the panic as well. A quick comment on more Flexible Work arrangements. They are good. We should have more. There is Research Suggesting that Flexible Work arrangements do increase birthrates, and there is a study in germany looking at the expansions of the esl among the highly educated women esl . Sorry, fast internet, which is not fast, and we say that is slow, but it was fast at the time when it was invented. But it is to increase the share of work from home and increased the birthrate, because it is easier the watch a kid from home than the office. So it is great, and we should have more of it. Big fan. I work from home. On that note, i want topanel discussion. They will stay afterwards for a fi more of your questions, but i would like to thank the panelists for coming. Thank you. Watch our exclusive interview with House Speaker nancy pelosi as she discuss iin issues with senator mcconnell. Right now, it is very clear, he is not doing anything that the president doesnt want, and that is where we are. I dont know why a leader in the senate would leave his responsibilities. An interview with nancy pelosi and watch it now online at cspan. Org or later tonight on cspan online. Saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war, the 1863 campaign in tennessee. Tonight of the 26th, everybody is to concentrate on, the ullahoma and after they leave, it is anticlimatic, because with rosecrantz there to battle it out in tullahoma. And also, the lawsuit brought against the holocaust deniers. That is plan. No plan. No 6 million. No leadership from hitler and no gas chambers and the last point is that it is all made up by u jews. And then a discussion of shakespeare on politics. And then at 6 00 on the artifacts of the traveling Norman Rockwells exhibit. Explore the nations past every weekend on cspan3 on American History tv. The House Financial Services committee went to the Los Angeles Metro area to learn about homelessness and the impact on a National Level n. This portion, local community and Homelessness Prevention advocates talked about the causes of homelessness in their area, and what they need. The audio issues in the start will go away shortly. Our second Panel Includes mr. Tim watkins, president and chief executive officer, watt Community Action committee, and mr. Joe foyer, the local support corporation, becky dennison, executive director Dennis Community housing, anthony hayes, speak up, advocate corporation for support of housing, erica hartman, and chief Program Officer downtown womens center, and chancellor of alman corps, and executive director of the housing center. Alma vizcaino, downtown speaker of the violence against women and services center, and also, the chief and executive Community Leader of friends, and without objection, your written statements will be part of the record. Each of you will have five minutes to summarize your testimony, and i will give you a signal by tapping the gavel lightly when one minute remains and at that time, i would ask you the wrap up the testimony so that we can be respectful of the witnesses and the Committee Members time. And mr. Watkins, you are recognized for five minutes to present your oral testimony