“Saving” the USA from immigrants?

 4 February, 2026 

Author: Natalia Cassidy

Workers' Liberty

The pro-Trump think tank Heritage Foundation is intent on “Saving America by Saving the Family” (its new report, January 2025).

More specifically, the settled-American, married-man-woman family,

The crude birthrate has halved from about 24 births per 1000 people to about 12 per 1000, or 1.8 births per woman. That is below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman.

The Heritage Foundation is not primarily concerned with the falling birth rate as it pertains to falling contributions to transfer payments between workers and non-workers, and over time creates a higher ratio of people too old to work vs people working.

Its worry is intertwined with the racist and sexist conception that white women in particular should be having more children in order to “save” the white race from becoming a minority population in the US and having to look to immigrants to fill the workforce.

The report stress that white people have the lowest proportion of births to unmarried women and the highest proportion of children living in two-parent homes.

The Heritage Foundation suggests that the government stops “prioritising” welfare for single parent families, reduces public spending to reduce national debt, apply tax credits currently given to adoptive parents to married parents, and pays a 25% “large family bonus” for each child after the second.

Trump has recently announced his own (sort of) pro-natalist policy, the so-called baby bonus: $1,000 paid to newborn babies upon their parents’ opening a “Trump account” for them. Parents, relatives and employers can then pay up to $5,000 each year into this account. The money accrued will then be invested in US-based index funds and become accessible upon the child turning 18.

Gimmick

This gimmick is quite a long way from what the Heritage Foundation is suggesting, and offers almost nothing on the costs associated with raising a child. It may have some impact on the perceived cost of child rearing and a minor impact on higher education affordability, but is unlikely to do much to shift the birth rate. Historically, children were often an economic necessity for parents. Otherwise, when the parents got older, they would have no-one to do the heavier work on the land. Now, children are a heavy cost.

A separate Heritage Foundation document on New York says, yes, there should be more, and cheaper, but criticises Mamdani for not planning to reduce wages for the workers and health and safety standards.

Europe’s far-right talks “natalist”, loudly, but has not done much about it economically. Italy’s Meloni government is giving relatively meagre tax breaks. The Hungarian Orbán government pays out significantly more, with significant tax breaks and spending on families (approximately 4% of GDP is spent on family related policy). Yet the birth rate in Hungary has remained fairly constant since the introduction of those measures.

Policies that give economically-stressed people who wish to have children the ability to do so are of course a good thing. But the Heritage Foundation’s goal here is not support for those on low incomes, but an ideological push for women, particularly white women, to have children to bolster the nation state and offset the economic loss from deporting or deterring immigrant workers.

As socialist feminists, we are for a more collective approach to child rearing where the family unit is diminished in its primacy. We oppose pressure on on women to have children, or more children, when they don’t want to, particularly it comes with a racist, anti-migrant subtext.