The muffled explosions you hear are the sounds of European populations crashing. The UN Population Division has just released a report showing that Europe and Japan will undergo dramatic declines in population over the next 50 years. Europe’s population will fall by 122 million to 600 million, while Japan’s will shrink by 22 million to 105 million. Thirty-three countries in all, says the UN, will see their populations decline.
The accompanying aging of these populations will shrink the workforce, threaten to bankrupt pension programs and undermine health care for the elderly. Economies may be hobbled and national security compromised as the pool of young people dries up. Generational warfare may ensue as different age groups scramble for scarce government resources. (Should we increase funding for student loan programs or Medicare, for example?)
How would the UN rejuvenate declining populations in the developed world? It proposes to bring in massive numbers of young people from the developing world, in wave after wave of “replacement migration,” to maintain the workforce at its current level. In this scenario, Japan would accept 32 million immigrants over the next 50 years, Europe a whopping 161 million.
There is a great irony in this. After all, it is the UN’s zealous promotion of population control, radical feminism, and the like which helped to create the depopulation problem in the first place. But we at PRI have two additional concerns.
As regular readers of the Review know, birth rates are falling everywhere, not just in developed countries. As more and more countries fall below replacement, there will be fewer sources of new migrants to make up the developed world’s birth dearth in the years to come. “Replacement migration,” in other words, is not a permanent solution to Europe’s (and Japan’s) problem, but just a temporary fix.
Moreover, how can we justify extracting from the developing world so many of its brightest young minds. Robbing Peter to pay Paul has never been a very good idea, especially in this case where the Peters of the world — the developing countries — are so very poor and the Pauls — the wealthy countries — are so very rich.
And what of the social problems that will accompany this massive influx of new immigrants? “In many countries,” the UN report warns with bureaucratic blandness, “additional large volumes of immigrants are likely to face serious social and political objections, even as a means of slowing population decline and population aging.” Yes, like race riots in Berlin and Tokyo.
For these and other reasons, it seems to us preferable that countries experiencing a birth dearth enact pro-family, pro-natal policies to increase their birth rates. Although the report devotes only one sentence to this possibility, it does assert — without offering a shred of evidence — that fertility rates in Europe and the rest of the developed world will increase in the next few years. Europe as a whole will supposedly see its TFR increase from the current 1.42 to 1.67, while Japan’s TFR will increase from 1.43 to 1.73. “Fertility may rebound in the coming decades,” the report says tantalizingly, “but few believe that fertility in most countries will recover sufficiently to reach the replacement level in the foreseeable future.”
The overall pattern seems too evident to ignore. Once countries join the developed world, their birth rates plummet. Once people reach a certain level of wealth, they can be easily convinced not to replace themselves. Then when Planned Parenthood says that “Babies are not sweet little things. They wet and dirty themselves, they get sick, they’re very expensive to take care of,” the message hits home. (See “Contraception in the Classroom,” 7.) And home stays empty.
I recently received a letter from a friend of PRIs who lives in Florida. A neighbor of his, a young woman who commutes 50 miles one way to work, was bemoaning how little time she had to spend with her four-year-old son. Our friend suggested that she sell her $40,000 SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) and get a job closer to home. Not only would she have more time to spend with her son, he told her, she would probably also be money ahead. She shook her head, “You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband and I love this SUV.”
Who was it that said that no man can serve two masters? The young woman in Florida believes that she is driving an SUV. But in fact it is driving her.
