Leadership Quote by Nathan Deal

Nearly one out of ten is doing a lot of work here: it’s a statistic shaped into a mood. Nathan Deal’s line isn’t built to inform so much as to alarm, to make immigration feel not like a policy question but like a demographic inevitability. The phrasing puts the emphasis on “births” rather than people, as if the issue is reproduction itself - a classic political move that turns immigration into a story about the future electorate, the future culture, the future “us.”

The intent is strategic compression. “Illegal immigrants” collapses a wide range of lived situations into a single moral category, while “now account for” frames the number as a creeping takeover rather than a snapshot. That “nearly” is another subtle lever: it lets the speaker reach for a high-sounding ratio without owning a precise, contestable figure. It’s an argument that tries to win before the debate begins, because once the listener accepts the premise of rapid demographic change, the conclusion (“we must act,” usually through restriction) feels like common sense.

The subtext is less about newborns than about legitimacy and belonging. In American politics, talking about who is being born is a proxy for who gets to be American, and on what terms. Context matters: Deal, a conservative Georgia politician, spoke in an era when “border security” messaging increasingly fused with anxieties about public services, political power, and identity. The line’s power comes from its insinuation that the country is being quietly remade - not by persuasion, but by arithmetic.