Geopolitical Expert Peter Zeihan: Why Losing Immigrants Is Bad for U.S. Agriculture and the Country’s Future

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Reducing immigrants in the United States will hurt U.S. agriculture short-term and the country overall longer-term geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan believes.

“The United States really does have legs because of the openness of its society,” Zeihan told American Farmland Owner from his office in Denver, Colorado, “…until this year.”

For agriculture-dependent states where small towns rely heavily on newcomers to sustain schools, local businesses, and processing plants, Zeihan’s warning hits especially close to home.

His message is that curbing immigration doesn’t merely affect border communities; it threatens the long-term health of the national economy, the workforce, and rural America’s survival.

Peter Zeihan bio:

• Zeihan on Geopolitics (consulting firm) – Founder

• Zeihan on Geopolitics newsletter and YouTube channel – Independent Content Creator

• Stratfor – Former Vice President

• The Accidental Superpower (2014), The Absent Superpower (2017), Disunited Nations (2020), and The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (2022), Acceptable Range (early 2027) -- Author

Zeihan grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and has traveled the world since. He has worked for the American embassy in Australia, the Center for Political and Strategic Studies (a think tank founded by Susan Eisenhower in Washington, D.C.), he and appears regularly as a keynote speaker.

He considers himself a “geopolitical strategist, which is a fancy way of saying I help people understand how the world works. I bring an expert understanding of demography, economics, energy, politics, technology, and security to help clients best prepare for an uncertain future.”

Zeihan emphasized that the immigration debate cannot be understood in isolation. The world’s largest economies—Germany, China, Japan, Korea, Italy—are aging rapidly.

Industrialization, he noted, brought declining birth rates, and said, “You play that forward for 90 years… and you’re now running out of people who are under age 60.”

Zeihan underscored the severity of the trend. “We’re looking at ethnicities that will vanish from the earth this century,” he said.

U.S. Immigration History

The United States historically avoided this fate for a simple reason: it welcomed newcomers. As one of only a handful of “settler states,” the U.S. has a population built on absorption and integration. That openness, Zeihan argued, has given the country more demographic resilience than nearly any other major power.

But that advantage may be slipping. “This is the first year in American history, with the exception of the Spanish flu back in 1919… that our population has dropped, largely because of the immigration question,” he said.

For Zeihan, it’s not just the Trump administration deportations for those in the country who entered illegally or overstayed their work visas that concern him. It is also how the Trump administration is canceling temporary legal status for workers or refugees.  

If restrictive federal immigration policies continue, Zeihan warned, the U.S. will begin “starting down the path to national oblivion that so many other countries started so many years ago.”

Restricting Immigration Could Threaten Economic Stability

Agriculture is among the industries that are most dependent on a stable and plentiful workforce. Zeihan was blunt about what tightening immigration means for the national economy. He said, “There is very little economic case for the anti-migrant push. It’s personal, it’s political, it’s cultural.”

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He explained that modern American life depends on a layered workforce in which different groups perform different roles. “Part of the tension of a multicultural society is not just that we look different, it’s that we do different jobs,” he said.

And historically, when labor gaps emerged, “we’ve done that by getting other people,” Zeihan added.

If immigration slows to a trickle, the consequences ripple outward quickly. Zeihan noted that American leaders talk about doubling the size of the industrial base to restructure supply chains away from China.

But doing so without more people is mathematically impossible. The alternative, he warned, would require shifting white-collar workers into blue-collar construction roles.

Zeihan said this would cause economic shock that would slash American living standards. “…from where we are now at, like, 60 grand per person to something closer to 20,” he said.

Immigrants’ Importance to Rural America

In some livestock counties, meatpacking regions, and food-processing centers, immigrants have been the difference between shrinking towns and stable ones. They fill vital roles in labor-intensive sectors and, just as importantly, bring families, open businesses, and keep schools alive.

For agriculture specifically, reduced immigration means fewer workers in fields, barns, packing plants, and transportation. It also means fewer young families putting down roots in rural communities, communities already thinned by aging populations.

Politics of Immigration

Zeihan acknowledged that politics and culture play major roles in views about immigration. “You can always play the R-word—racism, that’s real,” he said, but added that anti-immigrant sentiment “exists all over” the world.

Humans naturally gravitate toward people like themselves, he argued, and diverse societies create inevitable friction. The U.S. has historically managed that better than most countries, he said, but media and politics have intensified divisions:

“If you look at the way our media’s degraded over the last 40 years, it’s pretty easy to explain,” Zeihan said.

Zeihan’s central warning, however, was economic and demographic, not ideological. America’s historic strength has been its ability to welcome new people and give them a place to thrive. Agriculture, rural communities, and the broader economy depend on it.

If immigration continues to decline, the consequences will be severe, even if they emerge gradually. As Zeihan put it, “We’ll still get there last. But… it is a concern from a cultural point of view for me. Shorter term, in my lifetime, it’s an economic issue.”

Peter Zeihan will be a keynote speaker at the 2026 Land Investment Expo on January 13, 2026, in Des Moines, Iowa. Limited tickets remain for the annual event. There is also a virtual option.

American Farmland Owner is a media sponsor of the Land Investment Expo.