On migration – Douthat in NYT:

‘However you react to that description, whether it inspires anxiety about assimilation or anxiety about xenophobia, it should be accompanied by a large reminding asterisk: This is only the beginning. That is to say, whatever you see happening in Europe now is just the initial stage of the defining world revolution of the 21st century — the rapid graying of rich countries (and soon, not-so-rich ones) joined to the great migrations from the more youthful regions of the world. I want to recommend two windows into this incipient revolution.One is the first installment of a series from my newsroom colleague Declan Walsh about Africa’s “youthquake,” the surge in population growth that’s going to give the continent the world’s largest work force within the next decade — two out of every five babies born worldwide by the 2040s, at least a third of the globe’s 15- to 24-year-olds by 2050.
Along with Walsh’s reportage on the promise and peril of this boom for Africa itself, and some amazing photos from Hannah Reyes Morales, the piece is worth reading if you still need to be disabused of the notion that the 21st century will exactly resemble the prophecies of overpopulated doom from the 1970s, with teeming masses overwhelming resource-strapped countries everywhere. In fact, Africa with its youthquake is increasingly a global outlier; much of East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a median age that’s rising and converging with Europe’s and North America’s. And what’s most striking about Africa’s situation is not some general Malthusian crisis, but the geographic-demographic imbalance, the deep and inherently unstable divide between the African continent’s youth and poverty and the rich and aging European continent to the north.’

(…)

‘This may also be true in the Americas: As demographic decline sets in across Latin America (birthrates are well below replacement in several Latin American countries) you won’t necessarily see an end to northward migration; rather, the driven and ambitious will continue to try to reach the United States, and stagnation may set in or deepen in the countries that they leave behind.’

(…)

‘But the anxiety of Europeans right now over their existing minority populations taking to the streets to protest for Palestine (or, it’s feared, for Hamas), and the punitive measures, like literal neighborhood demolitions, already being taken in countries like Denmark to try to break up immigrant enclaves, are just a foretaste of the political turbulence inherent in that kind of transformation.’

(…)

‘Britain had below-replacement fertility for about half a century, and it’s been relying on unprecedented immigration rates to supply younger workers — “by a very long way the fastest ethnic change the country has seen, not since the Norman conquests of the 11th century, but rather since the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the 5th century, or maybe earlier still.”’

(…)

‘But a rightward and anti-immigration shift without some novel source of people, Morland and Pilkington point out, yields the European equivalent of what we see already in Japan — a cultural preservationism linked to steady economic decline.
This is an alternative that some on the de-growth left and nativist right might explicitly favor. But I am very skeptical that simply choosing a stagnant preservationism will be sustainable for rich countries that aren’t islands off the northeast coast of Asia (and even Japan may yet be transformed). Europe is geographically adjacent to the African youthquake; it already has many channels for migrants to enter, along with substantial existing immigrant communities to help welcome them and immediate economic opportunities for new arrivals. Whatever migration’s potentially destabilizing effects in the longer term, there’s a reason even right-wing governments in places like Italy and Poland have struggled to make restriction stick.’

(…)

‘There is, of course, another possibility, which is that dynamism could be restored by higher birthrates, a “more children” option, which would render immigration less economically necessary while perhaps also making substantial immigrant populations less threatening to natives and more easily assimilated.
The question of how you raise birthrates is one I’ve taken up beforeand will doubtless take up again (after I figure out how to increase the marriage rate, of course). But to bring this newsletter back, in a sense, to where it began, I’ll end here by quoting Morland and Pilkington: “The only country in the O.E.C.D. that has chosen the ‘more children’ option is Israel.”’

Read the article here.

To start with the end, demography in Israel is more complicated than Douthat might think.
Where are the birthrates highest in Israel? Not among the elites in Tel Aviv, among the religious people, the Chasidim, who don’t serve in the army and are undereducated, in other words they are ill-prepared for a high-technology society.

As countries get richer birth rates fall.

As Hein de Haas has pointed out in his soon to be published book in the US How Migration Really Works the revolution Douthat is talking about might not happen. The amount of migrants has been stable for a long time, approximately 3 percent of the world population.

To find cheap labor elsewhere, and this is the driving force between much migration, you need poor countries with high birth rates. Not the poorest countries, most labor migrants come from countries where there is money to migrate, because it’s an expensive endeavor.

But chap labor might dry up one day because birth rates might sink also in Africa at a certain moment.

At that moment, we will depend on robots for cheap labor and some company.

Don’t be hysteric about ethnic change. The Europeans did change the Americas ethnically. Nobody made a big fuzz about it.