HMM: Trump’s Immigration Orders Are About Long-Term Demographics.

Behind President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations and block travel from seven mostly Muslim countries lies a goal that reaches far beyond any immediate terrorism threat: a desire to reshape American demographics for the long term and keep out people who Trump and senior aides believe will not assimilate.

In pursuit of that goal, Trump in his first weeks in office has launched the most dramatic effort in decades to reduce the country’s foreign-born population and set in motion what could become a generational shift in the ethnic makeup of the U.S.

Trump and top aides have become increasingly public about their underlying pursuit, pointing to Europe as an example of what they believe is a dangerous path that Western nations have taken. Trump believes European governments have foolishly allowed Muslims with extreme views to settle in their countries, sowing seeds for unrest and recruitment by terrorist groups.

This jibes with what a commenter said last night when I remarked that I didn’t like Trump’s paid family leave proposal:

I used to hate stuff like this as recently as a year ago, but if immigration’s getting cut off (rightfully so), the US is going to need to do something about its native birth rates. Right now the situation is that younger professional women have an easier time climbing the ladder than middle-aged ones, which means they put off children until their late 30s or early 40s so as to not interrupt this momentum. By that time, it can be too late in some cases and in others, they’ll only have 1, when the health of the state requires 2 or 3. Something needs to be done to change this calculus. We can’t have a system where our smart, successful middle to upper middle class women don’t have kids or barely have them. And a tax credit doesn’t get the job done.

Given the choice between twisting business’s arms in a way that makes me uncomfortable and demographic/fiscal destruction (god knows what happens to Medicaid and SS if our birth rates start looking like Japan’s), I’d rather grit my teeth and twist away.

Hmm.