New NPG Forum Paper Explains Demographic Results of Failed Government Policies

• NPG
• June 28, 2018
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New NPG Forum Paper Explains Demographic Results of Failed Government Policies

Increased fertility and continued population growth should be expected.

Alexandria, VA (June 28, 2018) – Don Mann, President of Negative Population Growth (NPG) hails the release of a new NPG Forum Paper by chief researcher Ed Rubenstein, 1965 and All That: Federal Laws that Increase Population and Illegal Immigration. 

Mann shares the author’s sense of irony in the US’s longstanding avoidance of any explicit general population policy while often since 1965 adopting discrete immigration, health and fiscal programs that have stimulated higher fertility and immigration, legal and illegal.

Mann cites the 1965 reforms to the Immigration and Nationality Act.  Despite Congressional assurances at the time they would not produce higher immigration, they had just that result.  With the Act ending unequal national origin preferences, Asians and other formerly restricted groups used their full quotas and promptly gained citizenship. The preferences they earned, Mann notes, then allowed them to bring in hosts of family members, who themselves then started new family chains. 

The 1965 Act eliminated quota-free entry for Mexicans and other Latin Americans.  But other unrelated measures continued to boost entries from south of the border. The U.S.-Mexico Migrant Labor (Bracero) Agreement from 1942-1964 stimulated new networks for heavy illegal immigration from Mexico, established new and prolific family chains, and increased the number of US-born children to be future sponsors of immigrants.

This brief study, Mann states, shows how even well intentioned labor, welfare, and health measures can boost fertility and immigration.  Author Ed Rubenstein explains how the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) subsidizes low income working families with refundable tax credits that grow with the number of minor children in the household – a benefit available to illegal alien households under IRS policy.  Mann and Rubenstein recommend that the EITC payments, as originally intended, be limited to refunds of social security and FICA taxes paid by the low income worker.  Other social scientists have found that increasing the now minuscule refunds to childless families would balance the program’s pro-natalist bias.

Mann also supports the author’s finding that the well intentioned Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1985 has been a major magnet for the usually uninsured illegal aliens and even for residents of Mexico in border areas.  EMTALA requires every hospital emergency room in the nation to treat illegal aliens for free in “emergencies”, which are loosely and generously defined.  The basic medical security that Act guarantees to immigrants matches in its magnetic pull the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in Doe v. Plyler requiring free public K-12 education to illegal alien children.

Free basic medical care and assured public education, Mann believes, remain open invitations to the world’s restless.  He is concerned that rising legal and illegal immigration and higher fertility among immigrants will soon edge out births as the principal source of U.S. population growth.  Mann again warned that continuing population growth endangers America’s resource base, infrastructure and even food security.  Mann concluded that NPG will continue to call for policies that would halt and then reverse the nation’s population growth to a sustainable level.