Unease with rapid demographic change is a major driving force in our politics. Neopopulist parties advocating tougher immigration restrictions continue to advance in Europe, most recently in Spain and the Netherlands. The more established parties of the European center-right, ineffectual at stemming immigration when in power, increasingly give rhetorical backing to enhanced restriction.
It now seems clear that at least a plurality of voters in Europe favor stark immigration limits. In the United States, President Donald Trump propelled himself past the rest of the GOP presidential field by promising strong measures to stem illegal immigration. He unexpectedly won the presidency and will quite possibly win a second term, even if he has failed to fulfill the promises he made to voters who backed him to get control over immigration.
How are we to think of an issue which produces such shockwaves to Western political systems? One tactic is simply to deny that concerns driven in part by demographic change have any factual basis, to label what the French writer Renaud Camus first dubbed “the Great Replacement” as racist, conspiratorial talk relevant only to the most ghastly extremists, such as the murderer who committed the despicable Christchurch mosque shootings.
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo thus dismissed the “racist and misogynistic theory that holds that white people face existential decline” because of rising immigration and falling birthrates. “That's pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric this theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat earthers without that group's scientific rigor.” In other words, it's obviously and ridiculously false. But Manjoo does not go on to explain why this is so. “The future is unknowable and demography an imprecise science” he tries, by way of reassurance.
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