I have written several times before about the rapidly changing global demography, but sometimes a message needs to be repeated until it sinks in. Just ask Coca-Cola.
One of the most important mega-trends in the world today is the changing demographic balance between the world’s countries and regions. Roughly speaking, some of the most technologically advanced societies with a high level of economic performance have below replacement-level birth rates and an aging population. This applies not just to Europe and the Western world, but also to East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and China. At the same time, less successful peoples as measured by their technological level breed faster.
Those who have a doctrinal dedication to open borders and the (highly questionable) claim that all peoples and cultures are equal will present a simple solution to this dilemma: Just let the dysfunctional societies continue breeding and let them send their excess population to countries with lower birth rates. The East Asian countries have not yet succumbed to such pressures because their political elites actually care about the long-term preservation of their people and are not open-border fanatics. Western political elites, however, seem stubbornly wedded to a nearly religious belief in open borders at all costs.
The challenge is that many people from backward societies will bring with them their dysfunctional culture if they move to other countries in significant numbers. As a result, we now have large and growing Third World ghettos in cities across the Western world, riddled with all kinds of social problems. How long can this continue until the newly arrived immigrants have made Western countries just as dysfunctional as their home countries?
It is true that birth rates fluctuate and will not necessarily be the same fifty years from now as they are today. Even in some Muslim countries such as Iran, they are lower now than they were a few decades ago. Yet they are still higher than in virtually all European nations. This is not just true of the Middle East or the Islamic world, but also of other parts of the global South.
A report from 2013 predicted that sub-Saharan Africa would record the largest population growth between now and 2050. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world’s poorest region will more than double in population, from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion. The current population of the entire European Union is just over 500 million people. It is estimated that Africa’s population will grow by more than twice that much, in two generations. Where are these people supposed to live? Will they have water, food and work at home? If not, where will they go next?
Many of them may remain in Africa. Yet if merely 8% of them were to leave the continent, that would amount to more than 100 million Africans departing Africa in just a few decades. If just 4-5% of Africa’s projected population growth in the coming 35 years were to head for Europe, Europe would be expected to absorb an African population the size of Poland or Spain in a relatively short period. This flood has already begun.