Our replacement rate has been low for a long time, but our population has stayed relatively steady… because of immigration.
Low replacement rate is only bad if you’re racist/xenophobic. Otherwise there’s usually (in a supposedly first-world country) an easy solution.
And if you think this is a dig on specifically the US, it isn’t. Japan and South Korea are about to have insane difficulties with a very obvious and simple solution, and the US had that solution and are destroying it in favor of racism and xenophobia.
I don’t think immigration is bad, but if the “problem” of fertility below replacement is caused by the other problem of people who might otherwise want kids not being able to have them because of economic constraints, focusing on solving the first problem by importing competitive and ambitious skilled professionals seems at least kind of questionable.
That is not the problem. Population declines as countries move to first world status, and I think the people not having kids due to financial constraints are few and far between. Otherwise population would not start and continue diminishing as an area becomes more affluent. People have less (or no) kids because they don’t want kids, don’t want a bunch of kids, and can reasonably expect the kids they have to survive to adulthood. And access to birth control, education, and other opportunities (mostly for women) makes having less kids (by their own desire) possible.
So bringing capable workers in means they pay into taxes that support the aging and school-age population, and never had to have their school-age years paid for. They’re a productive member with half the cost over their lifetime.
It’s a no-brainer… as long as you’re not worried about changing the… shade or hue… of your population over time.
The reason I’m thinking of it is I recently read this lemmy thread. The article itself is probably AI and not that convincing but I think people are making some good points about the pressures imposed by expense of housing and how those affect the desirability and difficulty of having children.
Of course a prerequisite for that to matter is that not having children is more of a real choice than it is for people with no resources in a state of poverty. But it isn’t necessarily the case that the difficulty of raising children decreases with country-wide affluence, because wealth inequality is a thing, required resources (like housing space) might become more expensive relative to income despite overall increase in income, and other factors like an increasingly atomized career focused society where community can’t be relied on as much to help raise children and the expectations placed on parents are higher, maybe requiring high daycare expenses.
So bringing capable workers in means they pay into taxes that support the aging and school-age population, and never had to have their school-age years paid for. They’re a productive member with half the cost over their lifetime.
I agree in principle with the logic here, but if those capable workers are being placed in competition with a population that is financially struggling, and those taxes are not being used to give those people more breathing room, that productivity isn’t helping and is being employed on the wrong side of a class struggle.
Our replacement rate has been low for a long time, but our population has stayed relatively steady… because of immigration.
Low replacement rate is only bad if you’re racist/xenophobic. Otherwise there’s usually (in a supposedly first-world country) an easy solution.
And if you think this is a dig on specifically the US, it isn’t. Japan and South Korea are about to have insane difficulties with a very obvious and simple solution, and the US had that solution and are destroying it in favor of racism and xenophobia.
I don’t think immigration is bad, but if the “problem” of fertility below replacement is caused by the other problem of people who might otherwise want kids not being able to have them because of economic constraints, focusing on solving the first problem by importing competitive and ambitious skilled professionals seems at least kind of questionable.
That is not the problem. Population declines as countries move to first world status, and I think the people not having kids due to financial constraints are few and far between. Otherwise population would not start and continue diminishing as an area becomes more affluent. People have less (or no) kids because they don’t want kids, don’t want a bunch of kids, and can reasonably expect the kids they have to survive to adulthood. And access to birth control, education, and other opportunities (mostly for women) makes having less kids (by their own desire) possible.
So bringing capable workers in means they pay into taxes that support the aging and school-age population, and never had to have their school-age years paid for. They’re a productive member with half the cost over their lifetime.
It’s a no-brainer… as long as you’re not worried about changing the… shade or hue… of your population over time.
The reason I’m thinking of it is I recently read this lemmy thread. The article itself is probably AI and not that convincing but I think people are making some good points about the pressures imposed by expense of housing and how those affect the desirability and difficulty of having children.
Of course a prerequisite for that to matter is that not having children is more of a real choice than it is for people with no resources in a state of poverty. But it isn’t necessarily the case that the difficulty of raising children decreases with country-wide affluence, because wealth inequality is a thing, required resources (like housing space) might become more expensive relative to income despite overall increase in income, and other factors like an increasingly atomized career focused society where community can’t be relied on as much to help raise children and the expectations placed on parents are higher, maybe requiring high daycare expenses.
I agree in principle with the logic here, but if those capable workers are being placed in competition with a population that is financially struggling, and those taxes are not being used to give those people more breathing room, that productivity isn’t helping and is being employed on the wrong side of a class struggle.