Every once in a while I get a message from the universe about interconnection. Our interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of nations, and indeed the interconnectedness of all things. 

The Buddhists, my inspiration for this theory (which was later corroborated by quantum physics), knew this 5000 years ago. But we are fighting wars because we refuse to look at the planet, the world, and our lives, as interconnected systems as our Native American ancestors did. The Native Americans believe that the land does not belong to them, but to everyone. It is part of an eternal system. That’s why they don’t sell their land; they merely lease it.

I got one of these messages about interconnectedness when I read the Manifesto of  the Buffalo shooter, who said that America needs to get rid of the black and brown people who are replacing whites who are already here (never mind that the first people here were non-white, and that the black people didn’t emigrate voluntarily). This Manifesto, which I actually READ the first 60 pages of, shows what happens when a lousy public education system and a lack of community service obligations meets 4Chan and Discord. 

This dude couldn’t even figure out that in a war, it’s the young people who defend the country, and we need more of them simply from a national security perspective. Who do you think signaled the virtue of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan? Mostly our black and brown people. Did he want to go to war to defend the country? I doubt it. He registered for college.

All this goes by way of saying that if you look dispassionately at it, “replacement theory” cannot work in the long term in its current iteration, because pushed to its limits it will mean the United States will have no people. It can only work if we change our attitudes toward both immigration and race. Even prohibiting abortion won’t get us to sufficient “natural increase.” There are only two further ways to get to a larger population, which we need for a military, a labor force and tax base, and those are annexation and immigration. Deaths exceeded births in half of US states between 2020 and 2021..

Mine is a grim and non religious way of looking at things, but it is true. All the populations in the developed world are shrinking. Japan has an aging and shrinking population. So is Germany.

Russia has been losing people for a while. In the early 2000s, sometimes it lost 600,000 people a year to alcohol and outmigration.  That is one reason the military couldn’t perform up to expectations. Not enough young men. There’s a theory floating around that the war on Ukraine was Putin’s way of doing what tech companies do to grow: make the “buy or build'' decision. Putin decided to “buy” the population of Ukraine through war, because there’s no chance that Russia will grow above replacement rate in his lifetime.

One global trend we are all facing, long term, is that we are all heading toward aging and shrinking.  There are very few states that are fertile, and they are mostly in the developing world, or what Donald Trump referred to as “shithole nations.”  The entire developed world is facing population decline. (I get my facts from demographer Dr. Jennifer Sciubba, who has just written a book on how demographics affect national security.)

All the rich nations are in danger of shrinking. Without immigration, which we are fighting tooth and nail, we will be shrinking, too, and according to Dr. Sciubba, once we fall  below replacement rate, we can’t recover.

So then what happens to our economy? Well, we will have a shortage of workers in many jobs that need filling, from doctors to plumbers. We already face a shortage of cybersecurity workers and construction workers, restaurant workers, and retail workers. These jobs are traditionally held by immigrants. Who among us, white guys, is stepping up to do these. And they will be the last replaced by AI.

It is incredibly naive to be both ignorant and racist, in my humble view. But if you are, please learn to keep your mouth shut and not carry your gun to the supermarket.

And pay your taxes so we can replace the broken immigration system that prevents refugees coming over the border to do our dirty work from accessing a streamlined identity system that will spit out work visas and documents immediately. This is not a political problem requiring “working across the aisle,” it is a software problem.

Think Global Entry. Think Clear. Think Israel. Think anything automated. The reason we have lines at the border is because we do everything down there manually. Why? This is the 21st century. If Ancestry can identify me and my relatives from middle Europe, it can identify people coming up here from Guatemala and make them immediately legal.

 And if that happens, the cartels will have to go into some different businesses. If people can come here and work legally and immediately, the human trafficking business has a much smaller addressable market.

It’s all interrelated, as the Buddha knew.