My wife and I decided to have children for an entirely prosaic reason: We wanted to start a family. I’m glad every day that we did; my kids are the most important thing in my life. Literally the moment my oldest son was born, I became acutely aware of my own age and that a clock was ticking on the time I’d get to spend with him. I wished I’d had him sooner just to extend that duration, but I realize that no amount of time would be enough.

I am, in other words, an advocate of having children. I understand that parenting isn’t easy and that I am advantaged in doing so by having a partner and a steady income. I also understand that some people who want kids are unable to have them. What I do not understand, though, is the prevalent idea that having children is an essential element of reconstructing some idealized version of America — that having a clutch of kids is how we make America great again, in all of the ways that phrase manifests.

It is true that Americans are less likely to have children than they were a few decades ago. Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week indicates that the fertility rate in the United States remains near its record low. This is not a development that is unique to the United States. Across the globe, people are less likely to have children than they used to be.

There’s an obvious contributing factor. In the 1970s, about 1 in 5 U.S. babies were born to teenage mothers. This spurred a crisis of its own, with enormous resources applied to reducing the number of teenage births. It worked. In 2023, there were more babies born to women 40 and older than to those 20 or younger.

My wife and I had a life together and careers before deciding to have children. I wish I had more time with my sons, but am glad for the time I had with my wife — and for the maturity I had by the time my oldest son was born.

Had we jumped into having kids as soon as we were married, though, we could have had even more kids, likely having to give up one of our careers to make it work.

Women are not dependent on men in ways they were a century ago, a shift away from a traditional ideal that can be grating to conservatives.

But the underlying politics has another dimension: That fewer Americans are having babies means the nation is more reliant on immigration to backstop population trends.

The idea that there’s an intentional effort to replace Americans with immigrants has seeped from the right-wing fringe into the White House. Vice President JD Vance and Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in suggesting that something American was being lost as the birth rate among native-born Americans declined.

On a podcast before he was tapped to be Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, Vance argued that “you can’t have so many people coming to the country at a time when our own families aren’t replicating themselves.”

The idea that immigrants could replace children of native-born Americans, he said, was “a sociopathic way of looking at the future.”

The “pronatalism” movement that’s received so much attention of late (including via articles at the Atlantic and in the New York Times) is deliberately and inescapably right wing.

“To say that most of the conference goers leaned right would be an understatement,” Mother Jones’s Kiera Butler wrote of a recent gathering in Texas. “Some of the topics under discussion were the ethics of gene-editing embryos to endow them with desired traits, how having more babies could save ‘the West,’ and why most women should forego careers to be mothers.”

The Times noted that fringe-right celebrity Jack Posobiec was a keynote speaker. He invoked the replacement idea explicitly: “We are not replacing ourselves,” he said. “Meanwhile, those who don’t share our values are.”

The Times reported that the conference was started by a conservative who “came up with the idea after watching a Tucker Carlson documentary about falling testosterone levels.” (This idea, which is not supported by scientific research, was hyped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Fox News on Tuesday night.) Another speaker was a guy who had “posted white nationalist theories on X and written books for Antelope Hill Publishing, which sells translations of works by Nazis.”

It’s impossible not to bring up eugenics in discussing the effort. Many “pronatalists” are worried about birth rates, but the movement carries with it a thinly veiled subtext of white superiority.

Even before Donald Trump was first elected president on a platform of ostracizing and expelling immigrants (and non-White immigrants in particular), his allies on the right were warning about a sort of immigrant-ification of the country. Stephen K. Bannon once claimed, falsely, that 1 in 5 U.S. residents were immigrants, taking jobs from U.S. citizens. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan carries an obvious appeal to a greatness that preceded our current racial and cultural diversity.

It is the case that immigrants make up a larger percentage of the U.S. population than they used to. But the percentage of immigrants — and, importantly, of Americans born to immigrant parents — is not higher than it was a century ago. At that point, an often explicitly prejudiced backlash produced legislation that effectively curtailed much immigration until the limits were lifted in the mid-1960s.

Back then, the hostility to immigrants was often rooted in the idea that arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe were something less than White. Over time, immigrants from those places and their children became assimilated into the broader White population.

In recent decades, most immigrants have come from Latin America and Asia, meaning many are Hispanic or Asian — populations that are (or at least are often considered) non-White.

Over the past 30 years, the percentage of immigrants who are non-White has gone from 74 percent to 83 percent.

The percentage of native-born children of immigrants who are non-White has gone from 46 percent to 76 percent. Contrary to what might be assumed, Hispanics have made up a decreasing percentage of that population over time.

Many of pronatalism’s proponents object as much or more to who is having babies in America than to the fact that Americans are having fewer babies. For every 1,000 White women in 2024, there were 51.7 babies. For every 1,000 Hispanic women, there were 66.1 births. There does not appear to be a robust effort from pronatalists to learn how Hispanic U.S. residents are succeeding where White residents are failing. Because the idea that Americans are being “replaced” is centered on the idea that it is non-White babies who are serving as the replacements.

No doubt thanks in part to Vance’s and Musk’s enthusiasm on the issue, the Trump administration is exploring policy incentives to encourage more children. (It is doing so, I must note, while slashing existing programs centered on fertility and caring for children.) As is the case with many Trump initiatives, this idea mirrors a policy implemented by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The Orban effort did not prove successful. When he and his party took power in 2010, Hungary saw about 9.1 births per 1,000 residents each year. In 2023, United Nations data suggests that the figure had decreased to 8.8 births.

I will admit that I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps it’s simply accepting that populations ebb and flow and that the U.S.’s once-robust position as a magnet for the world was an effective way to continue to grow. Maybe it is ensuring affordable day care and more robust parental leave policies, making it easier for younger women to have kids.

What seems obvious, though, is that the effort to increase the number of children born in the U.S. is harmed by being associated with a parallel movement centered on defending the primacy of White people in American society.

At least for the next four years or so, such an association is unfortunately probably inevitable.

Philip Bump is a Washington Post columnist based in New York.