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Same thing is happening to most counties in Europe but they’re “fixing it” with immigrants. But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing just as Sou

Same thing is happening to most counties in Europe but they’re “fixing it” with immigrants. But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing just as South Korea is.

jennyholzer 1y ago
[flagged]
- antiimbeciles 1y ago
  [flagged]
- wincy 1y ago
  If a Nazi says the sky is blue is that something we should also reject outright?
  - justonceokay 1y ago
    No but nazis have a way of presenting facts that are only relevant if you are concerned primarily with racial purity. Is Germany’s population growing because of immigrants, or is germanys “heritage” disappearing because of white replacement? If a man is hospitalized because he is having paranoid delusions about his wife cheating on him, he is still sick even if his suspicions are true.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      This is the opposite of what you probably wanted to say, but if the man's wife is cheating on him then he's not experiencing paranoid delusions, so hospitalizing him and calling him sick would be a form of abusive crazy-making behavior in and of itself.
- abstractbeliefs 1y ago
  It's a statement of fact, which is neutral on its own. Where it becomes a right wing talking point (or a discussion about the socio-economic future of a country) broadly comes down to how you present the causes, implications, and necessary actions. The fact that many more-developed countries having shrinking native populations is a fact that governments must reckon with in some way, and salting the earth on discussing because one faction is trying to exploit it cedes the ultimate policy decisions to them.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    It's neither neutral nor a statement of fact. Look at the grandparent comment: But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing... This makes a lot of deeply political assumptions about what a "german" is and whether an immigrant can be (or become) one. I'm not here to comment on whether these assumptions are correct and they're certainly common ones, but embedded political assumptions simply aren't neutral or factual.
    - abstractbeliefs 1y ago
      for what it's worth, I strongly disagree with the various right wing theories about the _cause_ and specifically the idea that there is intentional exploitation of the demographic shift, but it's not controversial that falling birthrates are leading to demographic change. I'm not German and won't presume to say who is or isn't (or should be) "German", but this is absolutely something that needs to be grappled with by governments. A shift in population being "supplied" by birth vs. migration is recognised in many Western/more economically developed countries, and that also includes naturalised immigrants (and their descendants). My personal belief is that the modern school of business thought is a form of tragedy of the commons: with every business optimising their extraction of wealth from people in isolation, individuals in the whole find the cost of living unsustainable and are increasingly living hand to mouth and feel they cannot afford or have the time to raise children. In this way, falling birthrates are an externality of modern economic doctrine. This is also true for immigrants, who are exploited for cheaper work, and as they naturalise fall into the same trap as being exploited for extracted wealth. In my eyes, the resolution to falling birthrates is that governments need to reach for social and economic levers to reduce the predation of companies on individuals, as well as to increase the amount of flexible wealth that individuals have so they can choose to raise kids if they want. I think that the idea that this is actually some kind of coordinated "great replacement" is deeply untrue and instead is a fulcrum to further distract, divide, and exploit people. If my belief on the root causes is true, however, governments must have the guts to reign in business, which does not prove to be popular in political circles. Instead, it is easy for governments to allow the political fringes to continue this narrative to "immigrant wash" discontent with life - rather than address the root of the problem (optimising for growth), they can announce "tough on immigration" measures that demonise marginalised groups who are politically inert themselves (immigrants, legal or otherwise, being much more restricted in their ability to vote and influence politics than established capital).
- tjs8rj 1y ago
  “A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people” The problem with Hitler wasn’t that he wanted German people to be successful, it was his proposed solution that involved mass murder between genocide and global war. This is a problem that requires thinking beyond lazy pattern matching
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - oezi 1y ago
    > A culture evaporating Well if you being your sentence like this, then you already made it clear that you aren't serious about discussing, because that is not what is happening. Any discussion that lazyly tries to skirt what Germans have done 80 years ago and tries to move into similar directions is just plain ignorant. We must get back to the real issues: 10m Ukrainian refugees because we let Putin murder in Ukraine. 10m Syrians being displaced due to the world's inaction to stop a civil war. The list could go on.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  The Nazi problem is/was not them saying "there are a lot of immigrants". It was the "solutions" they proposed.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
They'll do anything but pay their workers, and not overwork them. Almost like when you need to use 80% of your paycheck to pay rent that people can't think much farther than next month.
- wagwang 1y ago
  No don't you see, we just need more migrants to be a permanent underclass to do our labor
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    "We" being the actual decision-makers, the owners. The class who wants GDP to go up, but doesn't care about GDP per capita. Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
    - wagwang 1y ago
      The liberal order(consensus between both sides) of the past 50 years have decided that GDP is the only thing that matters and we should trade everything for it.
- tomp 1y ago
  German salaries are not bad, nor amazing. I actually think they pay their workers too much though - for not working. I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself! Generous benefits invite abuse…
  - nielsole 1y ago
    > I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself! I think three of these claims are wrong https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbeitslosengeld/finanzielle-hilfen/arbeitslosengeld-anspruch-hoehe-dauer https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbei...
toomuchtodo 1y ago
All countries will eventually experience population decline, it’s just the speed of each that is different [1]. Global fertility rate already appears to be below replacement rate. Even China appears to be below 1 at this time [2]. India and Africa will arrive there likely in the next ~5-10 years, depending on rate of empowerment of women. [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759
- Qem 1y ago
  > depending on rate of empowerment of women People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5388357/birth-rate-fertility-replacement-pronatalist-politics https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5388357/birth-rate-fert... - July 7th, 2025 > Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment. > There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth. > "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist. United Nations World Fertility 2024 Report - https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2025_wfr_2024_final.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 (additional citations) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (additional citations) (scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
pona-a 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
- wagwang 1y ago
  That article is full of gems like > Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
  - pona-a 1y ago
    You quoted the number but skipped the part where MacKellar says the whole premise relies on treating 3rd- and 4th-generation citizens as “not French.” > While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
    - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
      [dead]
    - dijit 1y ago
      Feels weird to call them ethnically French, especially when the context being presented is religion. The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy. Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
dyauspitr 1y ago
Why is fixing it in quotations? There are generations of Turkish, arabs, and Indians, that are very well integrated into European society.
- lossolo 1y ago
  Maybe because from a strictly evolutionary point of view, that’s a failure: they won’t pass on their genes (maybe also culture, values etc.), and other gene pools will take over the resources their lineage worked to secure.
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    That’s always happened in history.
    - lossolo 1y ago
      "Always" is overstated. Populations have been reshaped before (e.g. farmers absorbing foragers in Europe, steppe migrations, Arabization of North Africa, the Americas after 1492 etc). So turnover isn’t new, but this mechanism is different. This pattern stems more from our system and choices (schooling, careers, costs, contraception, culture etc) than from violence/war, disease, forced moves, so in that sense it’s self driven, and historically unusual.
      - dyauspitr 1y ago
        Unusual maybe but the outcomes are the same. Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old?
        lossolo 1y ago
        > Unusual maybe but the outcomes are the same. That’s an oversimplification. Dying of old age and being murdered both end in death, but we both know they’re not the same. > Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old? I believe I explained that in my first comment.
oezi 1y ago
Fear mongering. Current net immigration inflows into Germany are below 0.5% of population. The big immigration waves of the last 20 years can be directly linked to devastating wars: Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine. How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? Did it make Americans disappear?
- MaxHoppersGhost 1y ago
  Germans mostly assimilated and culturally were similar to existing Americans, sharing the same religion and similar values. Can’t say the same for Muslim immigrants at all.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    What about the Irish in America then? Culturally, they were not Protestant and were regarded as very different for a long time. How come we don't hear about this as an issue in the US today?
    - MaxHoppersGhost 1y ago
      They had a tough time integrating but ultimately they were Christian and European and had western values. Muslims don’t have any of that and their ideals of freedom amd rights aren’t compatible with western values.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? It's not a question of generations. There were a lot of German-speaking towns in the US, but World War I-driven xenophobia pushed them to Americanize.

Same thing is happening to most counties in Europe but they’re “fixing it” with immigrants. But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing just as South Korea is.

jennyholzer 1y ago

[flagged]

antiimbeciles 1y ago
[flagged]
wincy 1y ago
If a Nazi says the sky is blue is that something we should also reject outright?
- justonceokay 1y ago
  No but nazis have a way of presenting facts that are only relevant if you are concerned primarily with racial purity. Is Germany’s population growing because of immigrants, or is germanys “heritage” disappearing because of white replacement? If a man is hospitalized because he is having paranoid delusions about his wife cheating on him, he is still sick even if his suspicions are true.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    This is the opposite of what you probably wanted to say, but if the man's wife is cheating on him then he's not experiencing paranoid delusions, so hospitalizing him and calling him sick would be a form of abusive crazy-making behavior in and of itself.
abstractbeliefs 1y ago
It's a statement of fact, which is neutral on its own. Where it becomes a right wing talking point (or a discussion about the socio-economic future of a country) broadly comes down to how you present the causes, implications, and necessary actions. The fact that many more-developed countries having shrinking native populations is a fact that governments must reckon with in some way, and salting the earth on discussing because one faction is trying to exploit it cedes the ultimate policy decisions to them.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  It's neither neutral nor a statement of fact. Look at the grandparent comment: But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing... This makes a lot of deeply political assumptions about what a "german" is and whether an immigrant can be (or become) one. I'm not here to comment on whether these assumptions are correct and they're certainly common ones, but embedded political assumptions simply aren't neutral or factual.
  - abstractbeliefs 1y ago
    for what it's worth, I strongly disagree with the various right wing theories about the _cause_ and specifically the idea that there is intentional exploitation of the demographic shift, but it's not controversial that falling birthrates are leading to demographic change. I'm not German and won't presume to say who is or isn't (or should be) "German", but this is absolutely something that needs to be grappled with by governments. A shift in population being "supplied" by birth vs. migration is recognised in many Western/more economically developed countries, and that also includes naturalised immigrants (and their descendants). My personal belief is that the modern school of business thought is a form of tragedy of the commons: with every business optimising their extraction of wealth from people in isolation, individuals in the whole find the cost of living unsustainable and are increasingly living hand to mouth and feel they cannot afford or have the time to raise children. In this way, falling birthrates are an externality of modern economic doctrine. This is also true for immigrants, who are exploited for cheaper work, and as they naturalise fall into the same trap as being exploited for extracted wealth. In my eyes, the resolution to falling birthrates is that governments need to reach for social and economic levers to reduce the predation of companies on individuals, as well as to increase the amount of flexible wealth that individuals have so they can choose to raise kids if they want. I think that the idea that this is actually some kind of coordinated "great replacement" is deeply untrue and instead is a fulcrum to further distract, divide, and exploit people. If my belief on the root causes is true, however, governments must have the guts to reign in business, which does not prove to be popular in political circles. Instead, it is easy for governments to allow the political fringes to continue this narrative to "immigrant wash" discontent with life - rather than address the root of the problem (optimising for growth), they can announce "tough on immigration" measures that demonise marginalised groups who are politically inert themselves (immigrants, legal or otherwise, being much more restricted in their ability to vote and influence politics than established capital).
tjs8rj 1y ago
“A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people” The problem with Hitler wasn’t that he wanted German people to be successful, it was his proposed solution that involved mass murder between genocide and global war. This is a problem that requires thinking beyond lazy pattern matching
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- oezi 1y ago
  > A culture evaporating Well if you being your sentence like this, then you already made it clear that you aren't serious about discussing, because that is not what is happening. Any discussion that lazyly tries to skirt what Germans have done 80 years ago and tries to move into similar directions is just plain ignorant. We must get back to the real issues: 10m Ukrainian refugees because we let Putin murder in Ukraine. 10m Syrians being displaced due to the world's inaction to stop a civil war. The list could go on.
xboxnolifes 1y ago
The Nazi problem is/was not them saying "there are a lot of immigrants". It was the "solutions" they proposed.

johnnyanmac 1y ago

They'll do anything but pay their workers, and not overwork them. Almost like when you need to use 80% of your paycheck to pay rent that people can't think much farther than next month.

wagwang 1y ago
No don't you see, we just need more migrants to be a permanent underclass to do our labor
- HPsquared 1y ago
  "We" being the actual decision-makers, the owners. The class who wants GDP to go up, but doesn't care about GDP per capita. Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
  - wagwang 1y ago
    The liberal order(consensus between both sides) of the past 50 years have decided that GDP is the only thing that matters and we should trade everything for it.
tomp 1y ago
German salaries are not bad, nor amazing. I actually think they pay their workers too much though - for not working. I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself! Generous benefits invite abuse…
- nielsole 1y ago
  > I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself! I think three of these claims are wrong https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbeitslosengeld/finanzielle-hilfen/arbeitslosengeld-anspruch-hoehe-dauer https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbei...

toomuchtodo 1y ago

All countries will eventually experience population decline, it’s just the speed of each that is different [1]. Global fertility rate already appears to be below replacement rate. Even China appears to be below 1 at this time [2]. India and Africa will arrive there likely in the next ~5-10 years, depending on rate of empowerment of women. [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759

Qem 1y ago
> depending on rate of empowerment of women People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5388357/birth-rate-fertility-replacement-pronatalist-politics https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5388357/birth-rate-fert... - July 7th, 2025 > Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment. > There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth. > "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist. United Nations World Fertility 2024 Report - https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2025_wfr_2024_final.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 (additional citations) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (additional citations) (scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)

pona-a 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...

wagwang 1y ago
That article is full of gems like > Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
- pona-a 1y ago
  You quoted the number but skipped the part where MacKellar says the whole premise relies on treating 3rd- and 4th-generation citizens as “not French.” > While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
  - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
    [dead]
  - dijit 1y ago
    Feels weird to call them ethnically French, especially when the context being presented is religion. The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy. Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.

dyauspitr 1y ago

Why is fixing it in quotations? There are generations of Turkish, arabs, and Indians, that are very well integrated into European society.

lossolo 1y ago
Maybe because from a strictly evolutionary point of view, that’s a failure: they won’t pass on their genes (maybe also culture, values etc.), and other gene pools will take over the resources their lineage worked to secure.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  That’s always happened in history.
  - lossolo 1y ago
    "Always" is overstated. Populations have been reshaped before (e.g. farmers absorbing foragers in Europe, steppe migrations, Arabization of North Africa, the Americas after 1492 etc). So turnover isn’t new, but this mechanism is different. This pattern stems more from our system and choices (schooling, careers, costs, contraception, culture etc) than from violence/war, disease, forced moves, so in that sense it’s self driven, and historically unusual.
    - dyauspitr 1y ago
      Unusual maybe but the outcomes are the same. Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old?
      - lossolo 1y ago
        > Unusual maybe but the outcomes are the same. That’s an oversimplification. Dying of old age and being murdered both end in death, but we both know they’re not the same. > Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old? I believe I explained that in my first comment.

oezi 1y ago

Fear mongering. Current net immigration inflows into Germany are below 0.5% of population. The big immigration waves of the last 20 years can be directly linked to devastating wars: Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine. How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? Did it make Americans disappear?

MaxHoppersGhost 1y ago
Germans mostly assimilated and culturally were similar to existing Americans, sharing the same religion and similar values. Can’t say the same for Muslim immigrants at all.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  What about the Irish in America then? Culturally, they were not Protestant and were regarded as very different for a long time. How come we don't hear about this as an issue in the US today?
  - MaxHoppersGhost 1y ago
    They had a tough time integrating but ultimately they were Christian and European and had western values. Muslims don’t have any of that and their ideals of freedom amd rights aren’t compatible with western values.
palmotea 1y ago
> How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? It's not a question of generations. There were a lot of German-speaking towns in the US, but World War I-driven xenophobia pushed them to Americanize.