Hiding Our Replacement: How Western Governments Obfuscate Demographic Data

By Cyan Quinn

Our purpose at White Papers is to protect Western Civilization by promoting the interests and survival of the people who created it. That people group is a global minority and continues to shrink. In 1950, people of European descent made up 22% of the world’s population. Today, that percentage has shrunk to around 12%. As with populations of endangered species like sea turtles or certain leopards, the best way to protect this people group is to preserve their habitat. The nation is the habitat of human civilization. Even within Western nations, our numbers are declining rapidly.

We are not the first to come up with this parallel. In the UK, the red squirrel serves as a mascot for those interested in defending the native British.

It was first used by the founders of the groundbreaking survey We Were Never Asked which shows undeniably that British citizens do not want to become a minority. (We show how these trends can be reversed here.)

This is our primary area of concern, and we collect and publish demographic data wherever possible. We believe that by presenting accurate data and illustrating the policy failures that led to our demographic decline in our own countries, we can show that there are also peaceful policy alternatives that can reverse it!

However, Western governments appear to be obfuscating the data.

Few Western governments collect quality demographic data in the first place, and the data they do collect is often lacking in the necessary details. Only in a couple Western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom do the authorities work to collect decent data on race and ethnicity, but even they fall short of presenting a comprehensive understanding of the demographic reality. In Europe, the situation is worse, with governments often changing methodologies to hide the extent of demographic change. In some cases, governments have even made it illegal to collect statistics on race and ethnicity.

France is the most famous and well-known example of a Western country that prohibits the collection of race and ethnicity-based data. In 1978 the French government implemented the Data Protection Act (Law No. 78-17) which prohibits the collection of data on race or ethnicity unless permission is given on an individual basis or a waiver is issued by the French state. This law also extends to government agencies, research, and other institutions such as universities. Furthermore, the law prohibits the digital storage of this data. These provisions have been upheld multiple times by the French courts, including as recently as December of 2007 when the Constitutional Council (the French version of a supreme court) upheld the strictest interpretation of the law.

Another example can be found in Germany where both Article 3 of the Basic Law (German constitution) and the Federal Data Protection Act prohibit the processing and storage of data that applies to the race and ethnicity of minority populations. This forces German government agencies and private institutions to use proxies such as “migrant background” to track the non-German population. But this methodology has its flaws. For example, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Kazakhstan that have returned to Germany, speak German, and practice Christianity are not considered German, but are instead people of a “migrant background.” Meanwhile, third-generation Turkish immigrants in the country are often classified as “German – without a migrant background” despite having no discernible German heritage.

Similarly, the Swedish Personal Data Act of 1998 prohibits the collection of race, ethnic origin, or religious belief statistics by public and private entities. So this also forced the Swedish government to collect statistics on the basis of “migrant background” resulting in the same statistical anomalies. So far, in Sweden, there are not enough third-generation immigrants to significantly obscure the data. But in ten years, this will change substantially. Many hundreds of thousands of people marked as “Swedish” without a migrant background will have no Swedish heritage.

In other cases, countries attempt to collect demographic data on ethnicity but fail to collect data of usable quality. For example, the Russian 2021 census was such a disaster that government claims of 99% participation are widely disbelieved by the academic community both in the country and abroad. The Levada Center claims that only 42% of the Russian population was counted properly and some 17.14 million people have no recorded ethnicity within the dataset. As a result, no one knows what the ethnic population of Russia actually is. We also have no way of knowing if the Russian population truly increased from 77.8% in 2010 to 81% in 2021 (as claimed by the government) or if the ethnic Russian population suffered a steep decline to 72% as the data estimates appear to show.

New Zealand experiences similar issues with their 2023 census. Reports showed that members of the Maori and pacific immigrant communities were opting out at rates of roughly 40 percent while nationally, about a fifth of New Zealanders did not even return their census forums at all. Obviously, this severely muddled the results. Furthermore, New Zealand only counts people who are “normally resident” in the country and does not count hundreds of thousands of temporary immigrants who may live in the country for years at a time, effectively obfuscating the true scale of demographic change in the country. As a result of widespread criticism and even an election corruption scandal tied to the census, the government scrapped the model entirely, canceled the 2028 census (and all future ones) and will turn to a data sampling model starting in 2030. It goes without saying this model will not be particularly useful to anyone interested in exactly how New Zealanders are being replaced.

Failing to competently collect demographic data is one issue, but there are also countries that change their methodologies which hides the scale of demographic change. One of the most recent examples of this phenomenon is the Netherlands which used to collect data that clearly showed the Western and non-Western populations of the country. When the Dutch collected this data, it was possible to determine what the White/European population of the country was – and to reasonably calculate the native Dutch share of the population. However, the Dutch government decided to abandon this model in 2022 and switch to data based upon continent of birth.

Because of this change, the native Dutch population appears to have increased from 75% in 2022 to 78% in 2025. This is clearly suspicious since immigration remains high, the youth is emigrating in large numbers, and Dutch fertility is stagnant. The Dutch government is, in effect, hiding the fact that the native Dutch population is closer to 71% of the total population and is falling quite rapidly.

Then there are Western countries that classify anyone who holds a passport as a “native” of the country, regardless of heritage. Italy and Portugal are the worst offenders. The Italian government classifies anyone, regardless of place of birth or background, as “Italian” so long as they hold an Italian passport. This resulted in millions of immigrants and second-generation immigrants being classified as “Italian” which makes the country look homogeneous on paper when anyone with eyes can tell you it definitely is not. So, while official statistics declare that Italy is 91.3% Italian with a foreign population of 5.2 million people, the reality is that there are actually about 6.2 million people of foreign birth and 1.8 to 2 million of their children. In reality, native Italians are about 82-85% of their homeland’s population, and that percentage is shrinking fast due to a combination of aging and emigration.

A similar state of affairs persists in Portugal where the government collects no ethnic data of any kind and classifies everyone with a Portuguese passport, regardless of place of origin, as “Portuguese.” So while Portuguese citizens are about 84% of the country’s population, the reality is that 2 million immigrants (more than a million of whom arrived between 2020 and 2024) constitute about 20% of the nation’s population. Second-generation immigrants, a group also classified as “Portuguese” despite lacking actual Portuguese heritage, number about 180,000-210,000. It is likely that the native Portuguese population of Portugal is no more than 78% and, much like Italy, is in rapid decline due to a combination of aging and emigration of the native youth to other parts of Europe where they expect to pursue better economic opportunities.

Overall, Western countries are doing a very poor job producing quality demographic data, and we suspect they simply do not want to. We are reminded of the United States where the Department of Homeland Security claimed for more than 20 years that the illegal alien population was only 11 million before they just stopped producing any updates at all in 2022. (They notably have not produced new numbers even under the second Trump administration.)

We suspect Western governments know that to tell the truth about demographic decline would cause people to reflect on their own uniqueness and the fact that the civilization we created is truly endangered and may be lost forever. Naturally, this would invite public outrage and electoral defeat of the progressive liberal class that put these policies in place. We’re here to show that this is not the end of Us. These trends can be reversed peacefully and with cooperation from non-Western countries through Remigration as long as we have the courage and the political will to do so.

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