Whenever discussions about the declining birthrate and the unsustainable demographics of many developed countries happen there’s usually one solution blindly thrown out: immigration.
At face value that seems like it solves the problem. If you’re running out of young people then there are young people in other places you can incentivize to move in. We know the sort of arguments that come alongside this solution, too — increased tax revenue, growing the consumer base, and willing people to do jobs that aren’t being filled. People have inherent value, so more/enough of them definitely sounds nice if you want to increase your GDP.
We also know the typical arguments against it, which are somewhat more… diverse in their tone. Without getting into the weeds of it we’ve all heard someone talk vapidly about homogeneity or cultural assimilation. I’m not here to discuss that.
The problem for developed countries is that immigration doesn’t solve some of the of the biggest challenges that a contracting homegrown population presents: The causes of the decline itself and the loss of whatever they’ve invested in their educated professionals that would normally be passed on to the next generation.
The first issue doesn’t need much discussion. Whatever is causing birthrates to decline in a country is not going to just stop because immigrants arrive — their birthrates rapidly decline, too.
The second issue is far more difficult to grapple. We pass a lot more on to our kids than our hair color and accents — our success is like a launching pad for theirs. Whenever an educated person doesn’t raise a member of the next generation there’s an intangible loss of inter-generational investment. That is to say, the beneficial trends in achievement that you inherited from your parents and that your children would inherit from you.
This investment isn’t culture, money, or even ideology — it’s something like momentum, with each generation giving a bit of movement to the next. There are measurable components to this investment, which we’ll get to. For now let’s explain this with something we all already implicitly understand:
As much as we all love a good rags to riches stories, they really don’t happen that much. The chance of someone becoming a doctor when their parents were laborers isn’t particularly good. The likelihood of someone earning a doctorate when their parents didn’t finish primary education also isn’t very good.
There could be any number of reasons for this, though one can imagine that the child of a doctor is more afraid of being the family “screw up” than the child of a farm worker. Even if both people got an associates and lived comfortably one of them will probably be beset by a sense of not reaching their potential.
While it’s not necessarily fear that drives people to higher achievement, the fact remains that previous generations pull up the next one. Immigrants and their children are no exception to this.
Your parents education is a strong predictor of your own educational achievement. That shouldn’t be surprising — it makes sense, after all. So we’ll use education as our key metric to gauge this inter-generational investment I’m proposing.
For developed countries looking to solve their low birthrates with immigration the core issue is that there just won’t be enough qualified people coming in to easily replace all the childless professionals who are dying without contributing to the next generation’s momentum. They’ll lack the same parental advantages in education that the typical native has and as a group won’t have the same level or (potentially) quality of education.
Why?
At this point every educated country is running low on young people. Education is probably the best indicator of declining fertility we have, and the data is clear that increasing educational achievement, currently, leads to lower birth rates.
If you’re a country that has an educated enough population to supply young immigrants with good inter-generational investment then you’ll probably also need them yourself.
So what about just attracting young but less-educated people?
There’s a problem there, too. For one, there’s no guarantee there will even be enough of this category of immigrants in the near future — by 2060 every region on earth will have a sub-replacement birthrate. More immediate are the linguistic, structural, cultural, and institutional challenges that an immigrant student might face. These obstacles are significant for them and their children, both in entering education and also performing at their best. There no indication that these obstacles are going away, either.
Likewise there’s no good evidence that you can skip the multi-generational stairway to personal achievement — that’s as true for immigrants as it is for anyone else. Students from poorer backgrounds and with less educated parents have access to a lot of resources that enable them to go to college but they don’t perform like their peers who are the children of degree-holders. Assuming a person from such a background gets their degree then their children— if they actually have them — should perform closer to what you’d expect because you’ve closed some of that inter-generational investment gap.
But back to immigrants: until very recently the West has been able to be picky, letting in mostly professionals with high levels of skill and education. However despite that selectivity — or perhaps because of it — most metrics of success and education actually get worse over a few generations for the descendants of immigrants. We haven’t even begun to effectively research why that is in the social sciences, better yet address the causes with policy.
So right now we can’t seem to get this right with immigrants who have relatively favorable backgrounds for making up the gap in multi-generational investment. What makes us think we’re going to get it right when the only countries that are producing enough young people to have immigration are also the ones with even lower rates of educational achievement? Should we just recruit every promising young person in sight and effectively cut the head off of their industry, academia, and government? Surely that will create stable and sustainable futures for developing countries, right?
My focus on education here is appropriate because we live in the most complicated societies ever and the people who aren’t having kids to replace their roles in that society are educated people. If we want to try and solve this problem through immigration then we have to actually figure out how to do right by those immigrants so that they can succeed.
But I’m cynical that we can do that any time soon.
For now I think we need to focus on finding real solutions to declining populations. That may be as simple as simply letting it happen until it levels off which is an option that I’ll discuss in my next article. But if we want to use — and I mean ‘use’ in the exploitative sense — immigrants to offset some of its effects then we need to actually learn how to give them the same advantage from inter-generational investment that so many people are failing to pass on to the children they didn’t have. Right now, as best I can tell, what we’re giving to them we’re going on to take back in other ways.
