Two ways of looking at the West’s population dilemma

I recently wrote about the various unveilings and intimations of new alignments that have accompanied the Israel-Gaza crisis — with one reveal being the extent to which immigration is transforming European politics, forging a mass movement of Arab-Muslim protest that in turn may be driving European voters and even European elites toward the anti-immigration right.

However you react to that description, whether it inspires anxiety about assimilation or anxiety about xenophobia, it should be accompanied by a large reminding asterisk: This is only the beginning. That is to say, whatever you see happening in Europe now is just the initial stage of the defining world revolution of the 21st century — the rapid graying of rich countries (and soon, not-so-rich ones) joined to the great migrations from the more youthful regions of the world.

I want to recommend two windows into this incipient revolution. One is the first installment of a series from my New York Times colleague Declan Walsh about Africa’s “youthquake,” the surge in population growth that’s going to give the continent the world’s largest workforce within the next decade — two out of every five babies born worldwide by the 2040s, at least a third of the globe’s 15- to 24-year-olds by 2050.

Along with Walsh’s reportage on the promise and peril of this boom for Africa itself, and some amazing photos from Hannah Reyes Morales, the piece is worth reading if you still need to be disabused of the notion that the 21st century will exactly resemble the prophecies of overpopulated doom from the 1970s, with teeming masses overwhelming resource-strapped countries everywhere. In fact, Africa with its youthquake is increasingly a global outlier; much of East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a median age that’s rising and converging with Europe’s and North America’s. And what’s most striking about Africa’s situation is not some general Malthusian crisis, but the geographic-demographic imbalance, the deep and inherently unstable divide between the African continent’s youth and poverty and the rich and aging European continent to the north.

That means the dilemma of the 21st century isn’t how Earth will feed an ever-growing population, but how the world will deal with a potential mass rebalancing of population via migration, an altered wealth-and-people equilibrium, in a world where technology is making the movement of peoples easier than ever. The hopeful way to view this transformation is as a win-win: “African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing: a youthful population,” is how Walsh puts it, and you can imagine the future as an acceleration in the exchange of resources, with younger African workers going north and sending remittances south to help boost the developing economies they leave behind.

But it won’t be that simple. For one thing, as you see already in European migrant preferences, migrants don’t necessarily want to go to every aging country; they want to get to the richest or most dynamic or most generous ones — better Italy and Spain than Bulgaria or Romania, better Germany and Sweden than Italy or Spain.

So some aging countries, the not-as-rich ones, are likely to see continued emigration by their own young people (this is Ukraine’s dilemma, accelerated by war), rather than a simple replenishment by immigrants from Nigeria or Morocco or anywhere else. This may also be true in the Americas: As demographic decline sets in across Latin America (birthrates are well below replacement in several Latin American countries) you won’t necessarily see an end to northward migration; rather, the driven and ambitious will continue to try to reach the United States, and stagnation may set in or deepen in the countries that they leave behind.

Clearly, the richest countries will be able to replenish their populations with immigration across the 21st century — if they choose. But the anxiety of Europeans right now over their existing minority populations taking to the streets to protest for Palestine (or, it’s feared, for Hamas), and the punitive measures, like literal neighborhood demolitions, already being taken in countries like Denmark to try to break up immigrant enclaves, are just a foretaste of the political turbulence inherent in that kind of transformation.

Because, again, the scale of what we’re talking about, the interaction between migration pressures and low birthrates, is not mass immigration as we knew it 50 years ago. Here it’s worth reading a new paper by Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington, respectively a demographer and an economist, modeling Britain’s economic and demographic future. Britain had below-replacement fertility for about half a century, and it’s been relying on unprecedented immigration rates to supply younger workers — “by a very long way the fastest ethnic change the country has seen, not since the Norman conquests of the 11th century, but rather since the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the 5th century, or maybe earlier still.”

That’s what happened already, and it hasn’t prevented Britain from already slipping a bit into economic stagnation. (Here it’s also important to stress that when you rely on immigration for younger workers, it’s not a one-off solution: If your birthrates stay low, you have to keep finding new immigrants, because immigrants don’t all come as 18-year-olds; they themselves age and become retirees, their own birthrates converge with natives’, and they often bring their older relatives after them.)

What will happen, though, is something much more dramatic. According to Morland and Pilkington’s projections, if current birthrates hold in Britain, within 50 years, more than a third of the country’s population would need to be first-generation immigrants to keep the old-age dependency ratio around 40%. (A 25% ratio means there are four workers for every retiree; a 50% ratio, just two.) If birthrates slump much further — toward the dire level seen in South Korea — to maintain a sustainable dependency ratio in the late 21st century, more than half of Britain’s population would need to be first-generation immigrants.

I don’t think you need to be especially pessimistic to regard that kind of transformation as incompatible with stable democratic governance. It’s among the reasons you already have the rightward shift in European politics and why immigration restriction will be a winning issue for the foreseeable future in many European countries.

But a rightward and anti-immigration shift without some novel source of people, Morland and Pilkington point out, yields the European equivalent of what we see already in Japan — a cultural preservationism linked to steady economic decline.

This is an alternative that some on the de-growth left and nativist right might explicitly favor. But I am very skeptical that simply choosing a stagnant preservationism will be sustainable for rich countries that aren’t islands off the northeast coast of Asia (and even Japan may yet be transformed). Europe is geographically adjacent to the African youthquake; it already has many channels for migrants to enter, along with substantial existing immigrant communities to help welcome them and immediate economic opportunities for new arrivals.

Whatever migration’s potentially destabilizing effects in the longer term, there’s a reason even right-wing governments in places like Italy and Poland have struggled to make restriction stick.

It’s not that I think borders inherently can’t be enforced or that immigration can’t be restricted and redirected; clearly policy matters, as you can see just in the differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration.

But the circumstances of the 21st century are going to be highly unusual by historical standards, Europe’s situation is different from America’s, and I think conservatives and immigration restrictionists who imagine that it’s simply a matter of will are going find that even a much more right-wing continent will end up looking more like Morland and Pilkington’s scenario of rapid and destabilizing demographic transformation than like contemporary Japan.

There is, of course, another possibility, which is that dynamism could be restored by higher birthrates, a “more children” option, which would render immigration less economically necessary while perhaps also making substantial immigrant populations less threatening to natives and more easily assimilated.

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