Hard Reality for the Right Wing
An excursion into the right-wing posts on X is dangerous to your psyche. Not because you will necessarily view anything misleading or false, but because you may come away filled with indignation and fighting off despair.
Perhaps the most defining and animating issue for the Right in western nations is immigration, and the trends are not ambiguous. Which is to say, you don’t have engage in creative statistics to see what is happening. By the tens of millions, people from Africa, the Middle East, and to a lesser degree, from Latin America, are migrating into the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.
The consequences of this mass migration remain open to debate. It is not unthinkable that the vitality of Western European culture will prove so resilient that these massive waves of newcomers assimilate at a rate sufficient to prevent a splintering of society. The other result is also possible. Western nations may become so overwhelmed by migrants from cultures hostile to western values that they are no longer recognizable as home to the native descendants of the people who built them.
The numbers are staggering. In both the European Union and the United States, approximately 14 percent of the population is foreign born. Merely citing first generation immigrants however is to grossly understate the demographic significance of the ongoing migration. For example, in the United States in 2020, 26 percent of the children under 18 in the United States have at least one first generation immigrant parent. A 2024 study of the European Union by nation reported second generation immigrants comprising 12.7 percent of the population in France and 12.8 percent in Germany.
It’s not easy to get comprehensive data on the number of immigrants and their descendants in the EU or the USA, but the numbers are significant. More significant, however, is the disparity in birth rates. A 2024 study by the Hoover Institution reported that “a Muslim woman in Europe had on average 2.6 children, a full child more than an average non-Muslim woman that year.” In the United States, a 2023 study released by the Center for Immigration Studies found that “The immigrants in the United States with the highest birth rates are those from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Central America.”
Diving too deep into these statistics can obscure the central fact: birth rates in the westernized, developed nations worldwide have plummeted to near extinction levels, at the same time as birthrates in Africa and much of the Middle East remain so robust that the population in many of these nations will double within 20-30 years.
People who are right wing, or even just right-of-center, can be forgiven to find this of concern. Because in both the United States and Western Europe, they are being trained to abandon lives of traditional marriage and family formation in favor of careers and hedonistic fulfillment, at the same time as they are being trained to view families as environmentally unsustainable. In the United States they are being indoctrinated to feel as if their nation is founded on “stolen land,” and in Europe, they are being indoctrinated to believe their continent was once home to multiethnic societies. And throughout western nations, the white population is being told that they enjoy unwarranted privilege and are practitioners of both systemic and unconscious racism for which they must atone.
Meanwhile, immigrants to western nations are still connected to their cultures of origin with tools that previous generations of immigrants couldn’t begin to imagine. They live in an age of jet travel and instant global communication, with online communities that enable them to easily resist the cultural pressures that in previous centuries all but guaranteed assimilation.
Not helping at all, of course, is the ubiquitous tagging of anyone worried about these trends as right wing. Apologies for that. Here, at least, it’s a shorthand, only useful in pursuit of clarity. But there is a hard truth that ought to vindicate much of what agitates the so-called right wing: Nations with appalling records of human rights including endemic sexist suppression of women, totally failed states with cultures marked by corruption and brutality, are the only nations left on earth with positive birthrates. Those are the nations sending “refugees” to the developed nations of the world, and they will keep coming as long as the business and financial elites who run the US and the EU deem it in their economic and political interests to bring them in.
There are no easy choices. The tide of immigrants may very well overwhelm American and European culture and turn all nations into chaotic warehouses of bickering factions, ruled by a small, despotic oligarchy. If that is not the outcome, the political solution is to convert these waves of immigrants to American and European values. That would require utterly destroying the leftist teachers union that has made its mission to immerse children of European descent with self-hatred, shame, and fear, while teaching anyone of non-European descent to feel resentful and victimized. It would require destroying all instruments of leftism. It’s too soon to tell if it will matter, but some of that is beginning to happen in the United States since Trump took office.
Another choice is harder, but must be faced. There is no excuse for westernized, highly educated people – no matter what their ethnicity – to stop having children. But that is exactly what is happening. If you are still young and fertile, figure it out. Get married and live with parents. Multi-generational households used to be the norm. Reject materialism as an unfulfilling debt trap. Recognize hedonism for what it is, pointless gratification followed by pointless death. And demand politicians locally and nationally start deregulating the housing market so homes will be affordable again.
Increasing birthrates among westernized people, ultimately, is the only battle that matters. A shrinking, aging population is doomed, no matter what else may happen in its favor. Whereas a growing population of people who are proud of their heritage and values cannot be defeated. People on the right may bemoan the conspiracy of population replacement, and maybe they’re right. But if they don’t start having children, all their concerns – prolific on X though they may be – are just tears in the rain.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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