Harry Dent: America’s Demographic Time Bomb

“A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in.. And how many want out.”

― Tony Blair

November 5, 2025 — All developed countries are facing very slow, and even negative population growth, and getting people to have more children is very challenging when it costs more than ever, $300,000 average per kid through high school, to raise them.

It’s called a shrinking nation and Japan, South Korea and China are the largest and fastest shrinking along with a number of Southern European nations with Greece and Italy the worst, and Spain to follow soon.

This population peak in the developed world is a huge challenge that few are taking seriously.

But here was the biggest surprise to me when I delved in deeper. I just assumed more like a near majority of our legal immigrants were from Mexico. The truth is our legal immigration is far more diverse.

As of 2023 only 22% of our immigrant population came from Mexico. And the next two sources were China and India at only 6% each.

The rest come from around the world, and especially a wide variety of countries from South and Central America. Many of them come through Mexico, not from.

To me, the surprisingly wide diversity of immigrants by country makes it less of a threat politically and socially. And we are already designed for assimilating immigrants as we had a very small native population originally that was not European.

I doubt any other country is more representative of the whole fishbowl in the world than the U.S. That can be a major competitive advantage in exporting to and dealing with other nations.

Still, there’s been a steep decline in net immigration since its last high in 2001 at 1.17 million. Most people don’t realize how much it fell into 2021, down to 0.376 million before it started to bounce strongly again under Biden.

You can see how our births have fallen in the same time period from 4.047M down to 3.688M.

What’s most scary is that deaths have risen from 2.42M to 3.44M in the same period leaving a net increase without immigration at only 0.248M, that’s only 0.07 percent, damn near zero!

At .07% in natural growth in 2022 from births minus deaths, immigration is clearly now our only source of population growth. Zero Hour is coming soon!

The last two columns show the progression of births per 1,000 women down from 14.2 to 10.79 and deaths per 1,000 up from 8.49 to 10.36… or a net natural increase of only 0.43 per 1,000, that’s even lower at 0.04%.

There are people that would not mind a zero-growth rate, as it seems that overpopulation and congestion is a long-term and potentially ominous trend.

I’m just saying that the economy won’t like it, and countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy, Greece and Spain… with China ahead will suffer in growth from this obvious and continued trend.

In America at least, legal immigration has tended to come in surges, and then we tend to react against it.

The most notable previous surges were 3.0M between 2000 and 2002, and larger at 4.5M between 1989 and 1991 into the long-term peak of immigration. But the recent Biden surge for 3 years was the largest at 8.9M from 2022 – 2024.

And now with Trump there is the obvious reaction to that with a projected drop in 2025 to only 1 million from 2.8M in 2024 and the high of 3.3M in 2023 (see first chart next page).

It would be better from my view that we set a target for immigration annually as a percent of population and not let it just surge and then pull back more aimlessly.

I’ll end this summary discussion of immigration with the last factor: deportations.

Deportations generally rose for 20 years from Reagan’s first term starting in 1981 into Bill Clinton’s second term ending in 2000. (By the way I call Clinton the luckiest President in history as the economy had the best demographics of the Baby Boom and continued low and falling inflation. You couldn’t have messed up that economy if you tried.)

Then deportations fell from near 6.8 million to 2.0 million into the end of Trump’s first term.

Hence, he was indeed the anti-immigration President in his first term. Then the Biden bounce followed into 2024, but that was still not at peak levels back into 2000.

And again, the estimate is around 1 million for 2025 under Trump in his first year. And all I am saying is that decline will be felt by the economy on a lag and could be what ends up torpedoing his second term, along with his tariffs and the greatest bubble in history way overdue to burst in the next few years.

I objectively expect the music to stop while Trump is still in office, and no president gets re-elected in a bad economy (or his VP Vance), and this should be the worst since 1930-33.

If this decline had occurred right after he entered office, he wouldn’t have been blamed for it, or not as much. But after a full year+ and his tariffs appearing as a trigger, he will very much end up being blamed.

Harry
Harry Dent & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. from Addison: We’re looking forward to a wide-ranging discussion tomorrow with Harry on Grey Swan Live!

As you’ve seen the past few days, Harry’s knowledge depth on demographics is unmatched.

Join us tomorrow, Thursday @ 2pm EST/11am PST, as Mr. Dent joins us to bring us up to date on his demographic forecast for the next decade. And why he’s decided to “re-enter the public spotlight” with a forecast on the impact of the AI bubble and employment trends for the next generation.

If you’d like, you can drop your most pressing questions right here: Feedback@GreySwanFraternity.com. We’ll be sure to work them in during the conversation.