Ron Brownstein, CNN: “Far right White supremacist groups, conservative media personalities and now Republicans in Congress are trying to inflame nativist feelings among conservative Whites by warning that liberals want immigrants to ‘replace’ native-born Americans in the nation’s culture and electorate. But that racist ‘replacement theory’ inverts the real consequence of immigration for its target audience of Whites uneasy about social and racial change: Many of the Whites most drawn to the far-right argument that new arrivals are displacing ‘real Americans’ are among those with the most to lose if the nation reduces, much less eliminates, immigration in the decades ahead.”

“With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees. And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments… Already, in nearly half the states, the number of working-age adults – defined as those aged 18 to 64 – declined from 2010 through 2019, according to a recent analysis by Frey. Without immigration, that squeeze will only tighten in the years ahead, forcing Washington to either cut benefits for retirees or to raise the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare to an unprecedented level on the shrinking number of workers. If the nation severely restricts immigration, the fiscal impact would be to ‘double the load on working-age people of all these seniors,’ warns Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.”