More Immigration Won’t Lead to a Higher Birthrate
... over at the Wall Street Journal it’s always a good time to increase immigration. The paper’s editorial page—notorious for repeatedly advocating a constitutional amendment saying, “There shall be open borders”—recently ran a column by Jason Riley, a member of the editorial board, entitled “Want to Raise Birthrates? Immigration Is the Key.”
Curiously for a newspaper focused on business and economics, the column contains no numbers to back up this assertion...
Now, falling birthrates are an issue for almost all countries, developed or otherwise...
n itself, a smaller population doesn’t have to be a problem, since countries had fewer people in the past and got along fine. The real problem comes from the increasing share of the elderly, leading to fears of national senescence...
... immigration raises the nation’s overall TFR by a minuscule 0.08, to 1.8 children per woman, from 1.73 for the U.S.-born alone. So the presence of 50-plus million immigrants increases America’s fertility rate by just eight one-hundredths of a baby. This is because while immigrants do in fact have slightly higher fertility than the native-born, it’s not all that much higher...
What’s more, the fertility rate for immigrants has fallen more since 2008 than the rate for the native-born, pointing to a convergence in fertility rates...
Another colleague, Jason Richwine, estimates that the reduction in fertility among the native-born caused by immigration may entirely cancel out the effect of immigrants’ slightly higher fertility on the overall national rate. So, from a fertility perspective, it’s a wash...
Notes
Population cannot grow indefinitely within the finite borders - and the finite resources - of any nation. Population reduction and stabilization is a good thing. Only a madman or an economist would think otherwise.