While it often may seem I am pessimistic about the future, I found a great article that highlights one way in which America might be able to continue living up to its global responsibilities.  It is essentially a review of an interesting book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  It contains the kernal of a controversial idea to be sure, but I think it has much validity- we need more immigration, not less.

This may seem counterintuitive to many, but if one looks at the demography of the US as well as other major (or currently major) powers, one will see that population declines and aging are deeply problematic for Europe, Japan, maybe Russia and maybe China.  The U.S. more than any other one of those powers (though we should probably consider India and Brazil as well), has the potential to maintain a reasonable demographic profile that could allow for economic growth vs. sclerotic  social spending on older generations.  In other words, as the need to spend more on retirees increases, the U.S.  is better positoned than many other contemporary industrial (or newly post-industrial) powerhouses to afford it by being welcoming to new immigrants.

Here are a few key quotes below ,

"Predictions are rarely correct, but Mr Kotkin’s focus on demography provides a useful gauge of the vitality of nations. The Russians, the rump of the former superpower, are in intensive care. Every year Russia has some 800,000 fewer schoolchildren. In 1997 there were 26 million children and teenagers at school. When the new school year begins next September, there will be only 15 million, a barely believable fall of 43 per cent. Its vibrancy as a society is under threat due to lack of young people.

Japan is not much better. It has a shrinking workforce and rapidly ageing population. These factors, combined with bureaucratic government, have conspired to ensure that Japan has yet to recover fully from the crash of 1991.

The position of China is more complex: it has no shortage of young and ambitious citizens at the moment, but the one-child policy imposed by the Communist Party has skewed the country’s demographic profile. In a generation or so, China may find itself short of young people. It is in a race to grow rich before it grows old.

The extra million Americans will not all spring from the wombs of American mothers. The US will have to attract the brightest and most entrepreneurial young people from around the world, as will other greying states, provoking ever sharper competition to suck in new blood.

“No western-derived country produces enough children of European descent to prevent them from becoming granny nation-states by 2050,” Mr Kotkin has written. “In the next decades the fate of western countries may well depend on their ability to make social and economic room for people whose origins lay outside Europe.”

Now, the major question associated with this is- what becomes of "American culture" as new immigrants enter America?  Many of my fellow conservatives would be deeply wary of the cultural impact.  Indeed, this is a major consideration.  However, as Teddy Roosevelt made clear a century ago, immigrants who pledge real loyalty to the US should be considered Americans.  Essentially, we must make assimilation the cost of offering better opportunity for well being to those born outside our geopgraphic borders.  If we retain the bizarre "multi-cultural" stew many elites promote, all we will do is create the conditions for a slow moving balkanization of the country. 

The irony is that immigration policy is a key to America's future, but not in the way many think.  It offers, perhaps, the only chance to deal with the  demographic strangulation of American primacy, but it also has the potential to blow apart the ties that bind if done recklessly.