‘Replacement Migration’, or why everyone’s going to have to live in Korea

Down among the demographers, a row is going on. Will the ageing populations of the Western world need even more immigrants to avert imminent population decline and to support the unsustainable burden of the elderly? Or is migration on that scale just a simple-minded short-term solution which ignores domestic demographic reserves and which would rapidly transform, in unwelcome ways, the receiving countries into a radically different kind of society?

The United Nations Population Division has stirred this up with a new report on ‘Replacement Migration’¹. This informed the less fertile nations of the industrial world that they would have to think again about international migration. Substantial increases in immigration, some of them astronomical, were the only option in many cases to prevent declining population, declining workforce and declining ‘support ratio’, that is the ratio of people of working age to people of pensionable age. The press release, issued earlier, has already muddied the rational discussion of ageing and migration throughout Europe through the misapprehensions provoked by its incautious phrasing.

Some of the ‘necessary’ increases are merely large, others gigantic. To keep population constant to 2050 the European Union (population 377 million) is told that it will ‘need’ almost l million additional immigrants per year; 47 million by 2050. To maintain the working-age population will require 1.4 million per year, or 80 million by 2050. To keep the support ratio constant will require 1.3 million immigrants per year (almost half the population of Canada) or 701 million by 2050, by which time 75% of the EU population would be of post-1995 immigrant descent. For South Korea, the most exciting example, 94 million immigrants per year would be needed, almost twice its current population, adding up to 5.1 billion by 2050 (that is, 5/6ths of today’s world population). Even the United Nations decided that might be ‘extreme’.

Population ageing, the end of population growth, and incipient population decline, arise from two irreversible and welcome changes in human society. Family size has fallen to about 2 children or (usually) less since the 1930s. Expectation of life has increased to about 78 years. Both now contribute to population ageing; an upwards shift in the average age of the population. The over 65s increase; the ‘support ratio’ of taxpayers to dependent aged falls.

Countries with relatively ‘high’ birth rates (about 1.8 children, UK, France, Ireland, Norway, New Zealand) will end up with over a fifth of their population over 64; a considerable inconvenience but manageable. But if the birth rate in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and elsewhere remains low – 1.2 or so children – then over 64s will exceed a third of their population. That really would be a problem, with a ‘support ratio’ (workers per pensioner) below 1.5. Falling death rates also add to population ageing. But some of the additional years of life prolong active life. The onset of old age is being pushed back to well over seventy; people can work longer, retire later and still enjoy an active retirement.

What then is wrong with the UN report, which correctly analyses these points? By careless use of language, dubious premises become positive imperatives. Population decline must be avoided. Age-structures and support ratios must be maintained. These are all controversial matters, not axioms. The end of population growth does not threaten living standards, although rapid decline might. The last official British report (1973) concluded that ‘Britain would be better in future with a stationary (i.e. not growing) rather than an increasing population’². Many European countries (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands) as well as many local authorities in Britain have for years considered themselves overcrowded. There public opinion would welcome a reduction, not just a stabilisation, in population size.

Population ageing, the ugly sister of population decline, is another matter. But further population ageing is an inevitable consequence of lower birth and death rates. Much has been done to adapt to it: equalising retirement age at the older, male retirement age (UK); moving the pension age upwards; removing obstacles to longer working life (US, Italy, Japan). The old unfunded State ‘pay as you go’ pension systems, conceived when populations were young and support ratios were 10 or more, whereby the taxman transfers money from workers’ to pensioners’ pockets, can no longer deliver. Instead funded reserves (USA) or occupational and private pensions (e.g. UK) are needed.

There is no complete solution. Higher fertility countries, but not those with very low fertility, can thereby manage the problem. In any case this will lighten after the 2050s when the baby boom is congesting the Pearly Gates, not the pensions office. Western countries have already managed a fall in support ratio from about 12:1 in 1900 to 3 or 4:1 today without social or economic collapse. Had Britain attempted to ‘compensate’ its 1900 support ratio by immigration, on the lines of the UN report, its population would now be some hundred millions, not today’s 60 million.

Talk of even more migration misses the mark. Europe already receives many more immigrants than it knows what to do with (up to 1 million a year net for much of the 1990s). Regular labour migration is managed by work permit and by free movement in the EU. But most migration is unrelated to economic needs: asylum claimants, spouses and dependents. European public opinion does not on the whole welcome large-scale migration. Europeans think they know who they are and unlike (say) Australians, do not want to become something different. Post-war immigration has already turned large sections of European cities into foreign enclaves. About 10% of Continental Europe's workforce is out of a job. Europe's immigrants (especially women) are already less likely than natives to be in the workforce and are much more likely to be unemployed. Compared with its industrial competitors, the EU makes poor use of its own demographic resources. If people of working age throughout the EU had the same work patterns as Denmark, then over 30 million people would be added to the EU workforce.

The European Commission³ recently showed that while immigration could compensate for population decline, to ‘compensate’ for population ageing, 7 million new migrants a year (the population of Switzerland each year) would be needed even by 2024. Increasing retirement age to 65-66 (against the 77 claimed by the UN) or increasing productivity by an annual 0.8% (a bigger goal than it might seem) would achieve the same end. Even in low-fertility (but high immigration) Germany, another report⁴ showed that trends in Germany’s own unused resources should defer workforce decline until at least 2010. The UN Report cannot tell us why it differs so much from the Commission’s scenario because the latter is not mentioned. Neither are other important analyses.

The UN’s comprehensive new number-crunching in this area is without parallel. But the general findings are old hat. Demographic theory, and numerous simulations, have already shown that immigration cannot compensate for population ageing except with flows so large as to hugely increase population growth and rapidly replace the existing population with a foreign one – ‘replacement migration’ indeed. Immigration is impotent to stop ageing because the average age of immigrants is little lower than that of the natives, and while immigrants from the third world initially have higher birth rates, these are expected to decline. Instead, immigrants themselves age and ‘need’ more immigrants to replace them.

The UN has succeeded in showing dramatically that the demographic characteristics of the very low fertility countries must change if they are to end up with an economically sustainable age-structure. It is also right that up to the medium term, reductions in ‘native’ working-age entrants are inevitable in some countries, and could not be effected by increases in birth rates for 20 years. But its simple-minded mechanistic projections go too boldly into an unknown future, and its one-sided prescriptions send the impossible in hot pursuit of the merely implausible. In diverting its considerable talents to sensational demographic scenarios the UN has missed an opportunity to consider the problem in a broader and more useful context.

The root cause of excessive population ageing is very low birth-rates. An effective response must make the workplace, the tax and welfare system and gender relations as a whole more favourable to women, so they can fulfil ambitions, repeatedly stated, to have more than one child. In different fashion the US and the Scandinavian countries have shown the way, not for demographic engineering but for equity. It is up to the patriarchal Southern European countries, ‘familist’ only at women’s expense, to consider that example. Look after the women, and population will look after itself. The ‘easy’ option of encouraging even more immigration is short-term opportunism. It evades hard decisions and ignores harmful consequences.

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