Immigration is essential to America’s health, otherwise we would be losing population and heading to a downward economic spiral. According to Census Bureau figures published Thursday, international migration accounted for about 84% of the country’s roughly 3.3-million-person increase between 2023 and 2024; without it, the U.S. population would be without a shadow of a doubt stagnating.

In fact, newcomers pushed our populace growth to nearly 1%, its fastest rate in 23 years, proving that political calls by Donald Trump and others to close our borders are dumb as well as wrong.

Incoming First Pal Elon Musk has long been preoccupied with birthrates in the highly developed nations, adopting the line that these countries are headed to a sort of extinction. Just Saturday, he was back on the topic, using his social media megaphone to warn that “Japan and many other countries face population collapse.”

There are a number of public policy interventions that could conceivably help the crisis as Musk envisions it. There could be big increases in housing for would-be families who can barely keep their heads above water in small or shared houses and apartments. There could be safety net fiscal policies like an expanded child income tax credit and child care subsidies to make the decision to have children seem financially feasible in the long run.

Yet, the No. 1 policy solution to a declining working-age population and its strains on the economy and the social safety system is the one answer that Trump and Musk won’t embrace: immigration.

There is no substitute; no one has found an alternative, anywhere. Japan is on the brink of population disaster because they’ve tried every solution except a broader loosening of immigration laws.

Only recently, in the face of an ever-worsening crisis, have the Japanese lurched towards the obvious, too late to head off some of the painful effects of a warped population pyramid: too few young workers to support too many retired seniors. And the problem keeps getting worse as birth rates decline.

Europe is on the same path of declining populations, stubbornly refusing to accept that the much-maligned waves of recent immigration have been a lifeline. The anti-immigrant rhetoric has been so acute that an anti-immigration far-right extremist in Germany — ironically himself an immigrant — just attacked a holiday market, killing at least five and injuring hundreds.

The United States’ global primacy, the very idea of American exceptionalism itself, rests entirely on a base of mass immigration that has fueled our growth with newcomers from around the world. The immigrants and their descendants then become Americans. This is not and has never been a matter of opinion; opponents will claim that this idea is “woke” or globalist or any number of other loose ideological terms because they cannot refute it on the merits.

There is no American Century, no dollar as reserve currency, no unmatched military, no soft power, no cultural dominance, no scientific preeminence, no industrial might without the absorption of talent and labor from everywhere else. We can only hope this most fundamental of American ideals survives the second Trump era, before irreversible damage is done.

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