The Atlantic

Trump's Immigration Agenda Makes a Fundamental Miscalculation

The president fails to recognize how the financial security of his older white base depends on the people his policies shut out.
Source: Evan Vucci / AP

Updated at 1:14 p.m. ET

Like many of President Trump’s policies, the White House’s recent embrace of a plan to cut legal immigration in half rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic relationship between “the brown and the gray.”

That’s the to America’s increasingly diverse younger generations and its predominantly white older population. Today, kids of color represent nearly half of Americans 19 years old and younger and exactly half of the under-10 population. As Brookings Institution demographer William Frey recently calculated from Census data, the absolute number of white kids under 15 (not just the

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