At the same time, under US rule, the considerable forces of military presence, Operation Bootstrap, and massive hurricanes did not usher in an absolute population decline. On the contrary, with greater access to education, sanitation, and healthcare, the per capita income doubled, and the population appreciably increased. By 2000, Puerto Rico had nearly 4 million inhabitants, up from 1.8 million in 1940, and was the fourth-largest population center in the Caribbean. The new millennium, however, upended this trend. For the first time since the eighteenth century, Puerto Rico experienced a drop-in population. In the 2000 to 2010 period, the number of residents decreased from 3.8 to 3.7 million (a 2.6% drop). By 2013, it had dipped again to 3.6 million due to both a reduction in the number of births, which fell to 1.4 per woman, and out-migration (Stone 2017). Given the island’s history, this development should not have been entirely surprising. Not only has emptying been a constant of US colonial governance, but during the 1980s, several observers anticipated the current juncture as island unemployment exceeded 40%, and Congress reduced federal programs and promoted policies such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative to provide more favorable trade and tariff conditions to other economies in the region. As New York-based journalist Alfredo López (1987, 125) prophetically put it, “Puerto Rico is rapidly approaching the stage when its residents are superfluous to US interests.” Remarkably, what direct attempts at expulsion did not achieve in one hundred years, the “soft” tactics of neoliberal colonial-capitalism would achieve in ten: the “emptying island.”