Infinite migration will not solve our fertility crisis
Immigration is the policy forever scrambling to find a rationale.
TOM JONES
At the annual Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming this week, central bank leaders from Japan, the Eurozone and the UK warned that their economies need further immigration in order to fuel growth.
According to their warning, ageing populations and declining birth rates threaten long-term economic growth and price stability across advanced economies, and without a significant increase in foreign workers, labour shortages will intensify and inflationary pressures may rise.
Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda described labour shortages as one of Japan’s ‘most pressing’ economic issues. Although foreign workers make up just 3% of Japan’s workforce, they accounted for half of recent labour force growth. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said foreign workers will be ‘crucial’ to offset demographic decline. Without increased migration, the euro area could lose 3.4 million working-age people by 2040. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey highlighted the UK’s ‘acute’ demographic and productivity challenges, pointing out that nearly 30% of UK adults will be above working age by 2040.
When the mass migration project began, policymakers told us it was pure economic rocket fuel. As the huge economics benefits failed to materialise, we began to be told that the benefits were primarily cultural. Now we are told our societies will simply collapse without it. Immigration, as noted Christopher Caldwell, is the policy forever scrambling to find a rationale.
But using immigration to prop up the population is as short-sighted as using it to boost the GDP figures was. For a start, this is at best a short-termist solution. Low fertility is not a regional, but a global problem; research indicates that in just 25 years, 75% of nations will have below replacement fertility levels. That rises to 97% by 2100, with only six nations – Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan – escaping this trend. By the same year, one in every two children will be born in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The reality is that the world is heading toward a future defined by persistently low fertility rates, meaning the strategy of relying on immigration to offset domestic demographic decline will become increasingly untenable. Britain will no longer be choosing from a deep reservoir of high-skilled migrants, but competing for a dwindling pool and will be forced, in time, to accept whoever is available rather than who is needed.
Those who advocate for the policy also conveniently ignore, or fail to talk about, the sheer numbers required in order to achieve demographic rebalancing.
In 2000, the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN modelled two scenarios in which the UK utilised immigration to address the dependency ratio. Scenario IV, which kept the age group be Even if we succeed in using migration to patch the widening gaps in our population pyramid between 15-64 years constant at its maximum of 38.9 million from 2010 on, required 6.2 million immigrants between 2010-2050, at which date 13.6% of the population would be post-1995 migrants or their descendants. Scenario V, which kept the potential support ratio at its 1995 level of 4.09, required 59.8 million (a little over a million a year) migrants between 1995-2050, at which date 59% of the population would be post-1995 migrants or their descendants.
A more recent assessment, by Lant Pritchett, estimates that for Britain to maintain its working-age population ratios in 2050 through permanent migration, where each worker brings one dependent, it would need to become 40% foreign born.
That is a staggering rate of change, but even this may not be enough.
The argument that immigration is essential to fix our ageing population works on the assumption that immigrants will not only supplement the working age population, but also increase the fertility rate. But the idea that migrant communities will continue the fertility patterns of their country of origin is not borne out by evidence, which shows that when women find themselves in a different fertility context, they adapt their behaviours accordingly – an effect known as fertility convergence. While the total fertility rate (TFR) of non-UK-born women is higher than UK-born women, that is not the full picture; the fertility of non-UK-born women has been in long-term decline and in 2021 stood at 2.03, below the TFR replacement rate of 2.1. In fact, the TFR rate of non-UK-born women has not reached above 2.1 since 2014.
In fact, as I have speculated before, there are perfectly reasonable grounds to suspect that immigration is reducing the domestic birth rate. That’s because the sheer scale of immigration requires massively increases spatial competition for housing. This, naturally, means higher costs, and artificially increased housing costs are causing couples to delay starting families.
Even if we succeed in using migration to fill the widening gaps in our population pyramid, there is no guarantee it will deliver sustained economic growth (indeed, it certainly hasn’t so far). A shift in population that radical will make our society far more complex and, as the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argues, complex societies impose higher per-capita maintenance costs than simpler ones. Although many of his examples focus on complexity in terms of Bataille-esque energy flows, the principle extends more broadly; as societies become more complex, they require more layers of governance, more centralised information systems and more specialised roles that consume resources without directly contributing to essential production. Complexity – in this case demographic – is a diminishing return; each additional increment of complexity delivers proportionally fewer benefits.
The situation is not irretrievable, however. As Tainter writes: ‘When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential – at least temporarily – to raise marginal productivity.’ With recent advances in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, we stand on the cusp of a transformation as profound as the Industrial Revolution. China stands as a counterfactual to western use of immigration; its growth in the last decade has been delivered by productivity improvement rather than population increases.
This article (Infinite migration will not solve our fertility crisis) was created and published by Tom Jones and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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