No, Illegal Immigration Won’t Fix America’s Fertility Crisis

Americans do not need illegal immigrants to raise our children. 

Atlantic writer Olga Khazan disagrees. She is angry at President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration because it is disrupting the easily exploited servant class that provides cheap childcare. As she explains, “Millions of parents in the United States … rely on immigrants to take care of their kids. … Immigrants make up at least 21 percent of the child-care workforce — and this may be an undercount.” 

So? Americans are not obligated to set aside our immigration laws just so women such as Olga Khazan can have cheaper, more subservient nannies and daycare workers. 

Perhaps aware that demanding lower-paid servants is a bad look, Khazan attempts to concern-troll conservatives, arguing that importing childcare workers is a crucial pro-natal policy. As she puts it, “In his first public address as vice president, Vance said it should be ‘easier to raise a family’ in America. His administration’s immigration policies could make doing so much harder.” 

She argues that more immigrants, legal or illegal, mean cheaper childcare, which means more working American mothers. In contrast, “When fewer immigrants are in the American workforce, economic research suggests, women may work less or have fewer babies — possibly both.” She leans into the latter point, though she’s forced to admit that the “relationship between affordable child care and fertility is fuzzy.” Indeed, that is putting it mildly. European nations with generous childcare benefits and subsidies are not notably fecund. 

Nonetheless, Khazan argues that some data shows a connection between immigration and American fertility. She provides little evidence, citing only a working paper by a grad student and a 2015 study covering data from 1980-2000, which she claims as evidence that increased immigration led to lower childcare costs, which “seems to have led to more educated women having kids.” This conclusion may have been more revealing than Khazan intended, as it suggests that her denunciation of immigration enforcement is less an altruistic effort than a form of class warfare. After all, these lower childcare costs for “educated women” result from driving down wages for working-class American women. 

There are reasons for leniency in some immigration cases (e.g., those who were brought here as young children decades ago), but demanding a lax approach to immigration enforcement to have a cheap servant class is repulsive. Furthermore, importing endless waves of foreigners who will raise our children for low wages is not a sustainable solution to low birth rates. Even if low-cost childcare provides marginal increases to birth rates, it will not be enough to get native fertility back above replacement, or close to it. 

What actually boosts birth rates are marriage and religion. The solution to low birth rates will not be found in immigration policy but through people going back to church, rejecting the sexual revolution, and getting married. It really is that simple — and that hard. 

The core difficulty is not material. Yes, there are policy changes that could help encourage having more babies, starting with making housing more affordable by making it easier to build more of it. We should look for ways to ease some of the burdens of parenthood. 

But there will always be burdens, and lightening them a little bit may not do much to persuade people that they are worth bearing. That requires a change in priorities, a realization that what really matters in life is people. It requires us to stop worshipping the idols of status, wealth, and amusement. It requires us to realize that true fulfillment is found through giving ourselves away in love rather than hoarding ourselves for ourselves.

This was the theme of Hannah’s Children, Catherine Pakaluk’s study of women who have large families. Pakaluk’s subjects vary greatly in worldly status — wealth, career, degrees — but they are almost universally religious. They are united in the belief that babies are good gifts from God, regardless of the burdens they impose. So they are willing to sacrifice for their families because they know those sacrifices are worth it. 

Though Pakaluk’s work focuses on women, this is true for men as well. We are also called to sacrifice our selfish ambition and pleasure-seeking for the good of others, beginning with our wives and children. Yet this self-sacrifice is also the key to true self-fulfillment because we flourish through love and relationships. Children are a multiplication of love, and they provide joys far better than those of materialist consumption. The sad truth is that many of those forgoing children are just wasting their time — watching more Netflix and scrolling TikTok rather than accomplishing or improving anything. 

Furthermore, even the worldly sacrifices of having children are often less than they initially appear. Yes, parents have to balance their time and responsibilities, and what works for one family may not for another. But having a baby, or having another baby, is rarely the end of all accomplishment and pleasure outside the home. For example, Pakaluk is not only an economics professor doing research on women with many children, but she is such a mother herself. 

Fertility is about priorities and character, not immigration policy. The birth rate will go up if Americans prioritize having and raising their own children, not because they are offered a supply of cheap, easily exploited foreign women to change diapers. 

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All” (Ignatius, 2025).