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This paper analyzes the population evolutions and their political repercussions in Argentina from the 1920s to the 1940s. It deals with the various means by which demographic, statistical, and medical specialists and institutions reacted to the decreases of the birth rate and of European immigration after the economic crisis of the 1930s. To understand the specific configuration of the "demographic argument" in Argentina, one must take into account, on the one hand, the conflicts between the provincial and federal governments over the control of the statistic-gathering system, essential to the implementation of the national censuses; and, on the other hand, the enduring appeal of a moralizing rhetoric in a predominantly Catholic country, where fears of depopulation and racial decline were widespread among the elite. Finally, measures proposed to counteract the depopulation –?from social hygiene to pronatalism, selective immigration, and eugenics–? and their actual impact on the demographic make-up of the country are studied.