“Are our countries full, or are they empty? Do we need more people, or fewer? Are immigrants a drain, or is it the lack of native children that’s dooming us? The right can’t seem to decide – unless, of course, it’s not really about numbers at all.”
There is a peculiar incoherence at the heart of the far-right’s demographic panic. One moment, the likes of Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, or JD Vance warn us that the borders are swarming and the country is full. That the infrastructure is straining, the culture is dissolving, and the nation-state is on the verge of collapse under the weight of immigration. The next moment, they’re fretting about birthrates, urging women to breed for Britain, Hungary, or America. A volkish call to arms disguised as policy. So which is it? Are we full or are we empty? The answer, of course, lies not in economic arithmetic or demographic modelling, but in race.
Take Badenoch’s recent comments on the BBC: “We cannot solve [an ageing society] with immigration,” she insists. “It is making us all poorer.” Instead, she flirts with natalist policy “people should be having more children” while maintaining that government intervention should be minimal. Apparently, the same government that can detain refugees and deport them to Rwanda must not be expected to build nurseries or fund parental leave. “More white babies, please,” she says, just not in so many words, and certainly not on the state’s tab.
This isn’t a new fixation. The fascist imagination has long been haunted by fertility. From Mussolini’s “Battle for Births” to Orban’s tax-free wombs, the urge to govern the uterus in defence of the nation is a staple of the authoritarian playbook. In the modern iteration, it wears the mask of economic anxiety. An ageing population, a shrinking workforce. But it is never far from more primal concerns: ethnic replacement, cultural survival, blood and soil. These are the dreams of Fortress Britain, of “Western Civilisation”, under siege.
And yet, the numbers tell a different story. Immigrants are net contributors to the economy. Population growth via migration has helped cushion labour shortages, prop up public services, and subsidise the pensions of the native-born. The birthrate, meanwhile, is falling not because people have become degenerate or selfish, but because housing is unaffordable, childcare is extortionate, and wages have stagnated for decades. If Badenoch were serious about encouraging childbirth, she’d be calling for council housing, universal childcare, and a four-day week. Instead, she’s dreaming up ways to shame women into procreation while cutting maternity pay.
In this, she follows a global script. The American right, too, rages against “replacement” even as it guts reproductive rights. In Trump’s second term, JD Vance, now Vice President, has revived talk of a “parental patriotism” that seeks to reframe childbearing as a civic duty. Hungary and Poland offer tax breaks and medals for mothers. In Israel, the fusion of settler colonialism and demographic engineering has long made wombs into weapons. The subtext is always the same: we need our babies, not theirs. The demographic timebomb only ticks when the wrong kind of people are multiplying.
This racialised natalism is not merely hypocritical. It is dangerous. It turns women into breeding stock, immigrants into invaders, and the welfare state into a battleground of blood loyalty. It is no accident that these regimes increasingly conflate nationalism with fertility, that the politics of the border are bleeding into the politics of the bedroom. As liberalism falters and capitalism convulses, the right is returning to its most atavistic instincts: patriarchy, purity, and patriation.
The left must name this for what it is: not confusion, but ideology; not demographic realism, but eugenic fantasy. The problem is not too few babies or too many migrants. The problem is capitalism’s inability to support life. To sustain community, to value care, to nourish the future. That’s why people aren’t having children. That’s why they migrate. The only real answer to the demographic crisis is solidarity, not segregation. And the only way to build a world worth reproducing is to dismantle the one the MAGA right is trying to preserve. One baby bonus and deportation flight at a time.
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