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There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman. Controlled immigration is different from opening the floodgates. Also weird to admit that no country
by eska 4mo ago
There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman. Controlled immigration is different from opening the floodgates.
Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
- Erem 4mo agoKorea is starting to turn things around! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-birth-rate-increase-rise-echo-boomers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...
- Tor3 4mo agoFertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
- flakiness 4mo agoMaybe the fertility rate has to go below zero to bounce back... Japan's rate is like 1.14 yet [1]. Hopefully Korea has figure out something more actionable [1] https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/77220 https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/77220
- karmakurtisaani 4mo agoWhat's fertility rate below zero? Women not only have zero babies, they also sometimes kill babies of others?
- moi2388 4mo agoA rate below 0.99… so less than 1 kid per 2 adults
- karmakurtisaani 4mo agoLooks like that's below 1, but I don't have my glasses on so might be mistaken.
- moi2388 4mo agoIt is, merely saying what he meant
- Tor3 4mo agoJapan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions. Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50). If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that. (The worldometer site makes it easy to look up and compare various countries: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...)
- bulbar 4mo agoThe main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
- doctorwho42 4mo agoWhat solutions though? From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already. Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth. The community support and available activities. Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
- bulbar 4mo ago> extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already. Always a bad idea to compare with the US which is known to have a terrible social net. > The community support and available activities. Interesting. Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children? That seems to be a huge pain point in Germany. Also child support is too low. I agree that solutions might not be so simple that you can just "buy them". What you can buy at least is removing pain points and giving incentives.
- chaostheory 4mo ago> weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution. How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
- bulbar 4mo ago> Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution. Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
- fastball 4mo agoHow do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%. Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
- Tor3 4mo agoLook back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
- pseudo0 4mo agoThe last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
- Tor3 4mo agoIt only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
- Retric 4mo ago> no country has reversed its birth rate problem. America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth. So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
- Gud 4mo agoSo it hasn’t?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- kibwen 4mo agoUS fertility rates first fell below replacement in 1972, falling to 1.8 by 1984, then rising back above replacement by 2007, then falling to 1.79 today. Despite being below replacement for 53 of the last 54 years, overall US population has never declined. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-chart3.stm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-cha...
- Retric 4mo agoThere’s years where the population declined due to migration, the long term trend is very much a net positive. Recent policies have resulted in significant population decline, but so far they are just another blip.
- saltyoldman 4mo agoIn the united states the birthrate problem is largely climate change panic (which is not a reason to not have kids because other populations / immigrants start accelerating their birth rates), and then because of heavy migration and other market factors, home prices have skyrocketed. Many couples don't want to have kids until they at least buy their "starter house". I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
- doctorwho42 4mo agoWell their economy isn't helping; they export a ton because it is more profitable to export than to sell domestically. Their work culture actually rivals the US for toxicity. And they dove into the modern technological society fully before anyone other than maybe Korea... Who is also having birth rate problems
- armada651 4mo agoI guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.
- saltyoldman 4mo agoWell it's true, I've had so many girlfriends that have literally told me they are not sure about bringing more people into this world because there are already too many it's ruining the planet. Institutional brainwashing.
- Schiendelman 4mo agoWhat makes you call this "brainwashing"? Fewer kids really does mean less resource use.
- lovich 4mo ago> There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman. Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade. The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...
- red-iron-pine 4mo agothere is no birth rate solution. but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.