Native birth-rate decline was a prudential Darwinian response to immigration

Evidence

Then, when the events of the eighties and early nineties turned his attention to the racial significance of immigration, the old problem of population growth appeared in a new light. Might not the dwindling birth rate be a prudential response by the old American stock to a Darwinian struggle with immigrants capable of underbidding and outbreeding them? With an ingenious show of statistics, Walker argued in 1891 that the reproductive decline was occurring largely among the native population and that immigration rather than domestic conditions was responsible for it. In order to compete with cheap foreign labor, he said, Americans preferred to reduce the size of their families rather than lower their standard of living. Thus the foreign-born were actually replacing the native stock, not reinforcing it; in the very act of maintaining social and economic superiority, native Americans were undergoing biological defeat. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 853

Categorization

• XREF: This is an early ‘great replacement’ logic — biological defeat through demographic substitution via differing birth rates. Connects directly to contemporary replacement-theory rhetoric the reader studies. — connects to: Native Americans restricted births to keep class standing, enabling biological replacement by immigrants — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 853; Eugenics converted Darwinian natural selection into a consciously applied tool of political intervention — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474
• QUESTION: Note Walker previously explained the same decline as urbanization; the ‘scientific’ reinterpretation follows the felt need for an enemy, not the data. Worth noting as evidence bias constructs the mechanism after the threat.

Broader Connections

• Native Americans restricted births to keep class standing, enabling biological replacement by immigrants #complicates (0.82) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 853
• Eugenics converted Darwinian natural selection into a consciously applied tool of political intervention #expands (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474