If “demography is destiny”, as the French philosopher Auguste Comte is believed to have said, then we know we are going to be in for some big changes by the turn of the next century. According to projections by the French Institute for Demographic Studies, in 2100 India could have double the population of China and the number of people in some sub-Saharan African countries may have doubled or nearly tripled.
For many developed countries today, the challenge is the opposite: they are already shrinking. Two major economies in East Asia have woken up to that fact; in Europe, it appears that nearly the whole political class have buried their heads in the sand.
Take South Korea. It has the world’s lowest fertility rate – the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime – estimated to be between 0.72 and 0.76 for 2023. That’s far below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a state’s current population. But officials are facing up to what that means. Last December, the then justice minister Han Dong-hoon warned that his nation could cease to exist unless it acted.
“When it comes to immigration policies, we have passed the stage of deliberating whether to implement them or not,” he told a meeting of MPs of the governing People Power Party. “Because if we don’t, we cannot escape the fate of extinction due to the demographic catastrophe.”
Last month, President Yoon Suk Yeol also addressed the issue, announcing that he wanted to establish a Ministry of Low Birth Rate Counter-planning. “We will mobilise all of the nation’s capabilities to overcome the low birth rate, which can be considered a national emergency,” he said.
Japan has a similar problem, with the country’s fertility rate dropping eight years running, bringing it to a low of 1.2 in 2023. That January, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told his country’s legislators: “Because of the rapidly declining birth rate … the country now finds itself on the brink of being unable to maintain social functions.”
Mr Kishida outlined policies to support and encourage child-rearing in an attempt to reverse that trend. But the country has also had to bow to the inevitable: there were a record number of foreign workers in 2023 – 2.04 million – and one study estimates the country will need nearly seven million by 2040 in order to achieve growth targets.
That might sound a stretch in a country that was historically thought to be highly homogenous and unwelcoming to foreigners. But a host of surveys over recent years suggests that view is no longer correct, not least because the demographic problem is acknowledged; and many might be surprised just how welcoming of outsiders the Japanese claim to be, at least according to these polls.
This is because a declining population is not just a matter of hurt national pride.
In developed countries, it means a huge rise in the elderly and retired who have to be supported by smaller, younger cohorts; strained or crashing care and pensions systems; and labour shortages across so many sectors that hoping AI and robots will be able to come to the rescue is no more than an electric dream. It’s unsustainable.
This is an issue for Europe, too. Figures from the European Commission suggest that the total population of the EU could decline by 6 per cent, or 27 million people, by 2100. According to analysis by Euronews, the average fertility rate in the bloc is 1.53 and not one EU country has a rate above the crucial number of 2.1.
Perhaps this doesn’t sound too serious. What’s 6 per cent, after all? A report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies would beg to differ.
“Demographic decline is perhaps more acute in Europe than anywhere else in the world,” it reads, “partly because the problem is exacerbated by the EU’s guarantee on freedom of movement, which speeds the ‘brain drain’ from economically under-performing countries in the south and east and puts further downward pressure on birth rates in these areas.”
The need to find “equitable solutions”, it concludes, is “urgent”.
One might have thought all this would be much discussed in the recent elections to the European Parliament, and in the coming ones to the UK Parliament and the French National Assembly. It has been alluded to a little, but all the noise has been from voices competing to call the loudest for an end to the most obvious solution.
British Labour leader Keir Starmer has promised to slash “sky high” net migration numbers. French President Emmanuel Macron has taken to attacking the broad-left New Popular Front as “totally immigrationist”. “They’re proposing to abolish all the laws that allow us to control immigration,” he said, somewhat implausibly.
That’s from the purported left and centre. Readers will be well aware of the naked racism of the far right and not-so-far right across the continent, when it comes to campaigning on what has become a central issue.
There is no doubt that immigration on any reasonable scale can cause difficulties. South Korea’s Han Dong-hoon made it clear that bringing in foreign workers was to “meet our needs”, and not to enrich the country with new and diverse cultures. The Japanese surveyed by the Pew organisation expected immigrants to want to adopt local customs and ways of life.
It’s different in Europe. Given – among other factors – the colonial pasts of many states, a degree of multiculturalism was inevitable, and especially so when people from developing countries were invited to fill labour shortages decades ago.
But let’s leave aside discussions about whether immigration benefits local populations by introducing them to different cultures, faiths, cuisines and so on, and, for now, how one manages issues of integration or assimilation.
The question today is: which countries facing demographic decline have grasped the nettle that they cannot put off doing something about it? Encouraging people to have more children is all very well, but it’s a bit personal, and there are all sorts of factors that militate against it, especially in a continent mired in stagnation, recession and low growth.
South Korea and Japan deserve praise for having approached the stinger – the need for immigration. Europe, on the other hand, seems to prefer to pretend that nettles simply don’t exist. How long can that charade be kept up, when even the European Commission says that the EU needs one million legal immigrants a year, every year?
