Kenyan Diaspora youth from St. Louis Missouri will be spending their holiday time helping children in Kenya as part of 2018/2019 youth leadership class to give back to the community.
The U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low last year, and if that trend continues, the lack of a robust workforce will start to drag the economy down.
George Mason University professor and Brookings Institution fellow Jack Goldstone says loosening up restrictions on immigration could be the solution.
He joined KERA’s “Think” this week to talk about his essay “The U.S. Needs More Immigrants” which appears in Reason magazine.
Stream the entire conversation or read interview highlights below.
Last year, the birth rate fell to 1.7 children for every woman in America. Why does that number create a problem?
Well, the arithmetic is pretty simple. If you have a mother and father together, and if their children are supposed to replace them in the next generation, you need an average of two children per woman. We’re not getting that: 1.7 means that there’s a shortfall every generation and that shortfall compounds over time. We used to say, “Well, that doesn’t matter so much because immigrants have a much higher birth rate and they’ll compensate for the falling birth rate among white Americans.” Well, you know what? That stopped being true right after the Great Recession. The last 10 years, the birth rate for Hispanics in America has been about the same — low, below 2.0 — as that for white families.
By KSDK News
