Why The Pro-Life Movement Should Support Immigration Reduction

Robert Locke

03/26/2001

March 26, 2001

There is currently a great ambivalence in the pro-life movement, a potent Republican constituency, about immigration reduction. While some pro-lifers such as Phyllis Schlafly have for years had enough wits about them to see through the sophistry, others have been taken in by the line that since immigration reduction is a cause favored by those who oppose population growth, it is therefore part and parcel of the same movement and mentality that produces forced abortions in China and other horrors. This fact has been cynically exploited by pro-immigration lobbyists in the past. The sloppy compassion-worship of corrupted liberal post-Vatican II Catholics has had its go in favor of immigration here, too. The truth, of course, is that the self-interest of the pro-life cause lies in immigration reduction, particularly in the long run. For two reasons:

The problem is not just the raw numbers of immigrants coming in, but the fact that they will then themselves reproduce, and at a higher rate than native Americans. This is particularly so the more they come from high-fertility Third World societies. Native Americans, like other citizens of highly developed societies like Western Europe and Japan, have a fertility rate that is at or slightly below replacement level, which is what a mature society that has found its natural level needs and can sustain, particularly with advancing consumer lifestyles.

It is also an uncomfortable fact, casting doubt on the idea that these immigrants are somehow truly pro-life even if they don’t vote that way, that Hispanics in the U.S. have a higher abortion rate than women at large. This fact, in turn, means that simply allowing them into the country, quite independently of any political or population-pressure effects, necessarily drives up the national abortion rate as a matter of simple math.

A friend of mine once tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade a political candidate he was working for in Louisiana to combine the pro-life, pro-gun, and immigration-reduction positions by adopting the slogan "Arm the Unborn to Guard the Border."

It’s about time we did.

Robert Locke is a former associate editor at FrontPageMagazine.com (archive here).

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