The policy forever scrambling to find a rationale

Tom Jones has an interesting CAPX piece on attempts to build a rationale for mass migration on the back of problems posed by declining birth rates.


Infinite migration will not solve our fertility crisis

• Some policymakers warn that foreign workers will be crucial to offset demographic decline – they're wrong
• Why do we assume that migrants will continue to adopt the fertility patterns of the countries of origin?
• We need productivity improvements, not population increases at all costs

At the annual Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming this week, central bank leaders from Japan, the Eurozone and the UK warned that their economies need further immigration in order to fuel growth.

According to their warning, ageing populations and declining birth rates threaten long-term economic growth and price stability across advanced economies, and without a significant increase in foreign workers, labour shortages will intensify and inflationary pressures may rise...

When the mass migration project began, policymakers told us it was pure economic rocket fuel. As the huge economics benefits failed to materialise, we began to be told that the benefits were primarily cultural. Now we are told our societies will simply collapse without it. Immigration, as noted Christopher Caldwell, is the policy forever scrambling to find a rationale.


The whole piece is well worth reading, particularly in view of the fertility convergence issue. I recall reading a book about demographics and the impending first world problem of declining birth rates about fifty years ago. Even then, immigration was seen as an ineffective solution because of fertility convergence. It is not new.


The argument that immigration is essential to fix our ageing population works on the assumption that immigrants will not only supplement the working age population, but also increase the fertility rate. But the idea that migrant communities will continue the fertility patterns of their country of origin is not borne out by evidence, which shows that when women find themselves in a different fertility context, they adapt their behaviours accordingly – an effect known as fertility convergence. While the total fertility rate (TFR) of non-UK-born women is higher than UK-born women, that is not the full picture; the fertility of non-UK-born women has been in long-term decline and in 2021 stood at 2.03, below the TFR replacement rate of 2.1. In fact, the TFR rate of non-UK-born women has not reached above 2.1 since 2014.