Title: Immigration does not solve population decline - Aporia
Description: Refuting a common fallacy
Keywords: No keywords
Text content: Immigration does not solve population decline - Aporia                           SubscribeSign inShare this postAporiaImmigration does not solve population declineCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMoreAporia MagazineImmigration does not solve population declineRefuting a common fallacyFeb 28, 2025190Share this postAporiaImmigration does not solve population declineCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore2332ShareWritten by Arctotherium.From the Canadian Century Initiative to Bill Clinton, “we need immigration to compensate for the low birth rate” is a common refrain. Those pushing this line rarely list the problems of population decline1 that immigration supposedly solves. Instead, we’re seduced by the notion that the economy or society is a sort of angry god that must be placated by additional human fuel, whatever the source. The population number going down is bad; immigration brings the population number up; therefore we need more immigration. (Composition isn’t mentioned.) Implicitly, this is a blank-slatist argument, relying on the fact that honest discussion about ethnic differences is excluded from public discourse.Making a state’s population go up for the sake of it is meaningless paper-clip maximizing. Once you start looking at the reasons why a growing population might be beneficial (to an individual member of society or the proverbial social planner), it becomes clear that actually-existing immigration2 makes the problems of population decline worse, not better.Effect on population ageingThe first thing to understand is that most of the problems of population decline, like pensions bankrupting the state or less innovation and entrepreneurship, are actually problems of population aging. That’s what separates the present decline, which is the result of low fertility, from past episodes such as the Black Death, which were caused by high mortality. Both involve decline, but in the latter case the survivors were youthful and vigorous and could bounce back quickly.The thing is: immigrants age too. This means that while immigration can definitely reverse population decline, it can’t do much for population aging. Assuming immigrant age-structure and fertility remain constant, the difference in the working-age share of the population in 2060 between zero net migration and 2019 levels of migration in the United States is… 2% (57% vs 59%).3Working-age share of the US population over time, by immigration scenario. Note the small difference between zero immigration and the 2019 level. Source.The picture for the European Union is similar. The difference in the old-age dependency ratio in 2016 between zero non-EU migration and the existing levels is tiny: 118:100 vs 114:100. By comparison, the 2015 level is 76:100. The total effect of all non-EU immigration on aging means that instead of this ratio increasing by 55% over 45 years, it will increase by “only” 50%.Age-dependency ratios in different years in the EU, depending on fertility and immigration. The relevant columns here are the Central Scenario (status quo) and ZIM (zero immigration, no change in fertility). Source.Because immigrants get older, trying to keep old-age dependency ratios constant this way is a fool’s errand. This can become farcical: maintaining 1995 South Korean age-dependency ratios would require about 100 million immigrants… per year, for a total of 5.1 billion by 2050. Needless to say, there are not 5.1 billion people on Earth who want to move to South Korea and are as productive as the average South Korean, which is the hidden premise in all proposals for using immigration to address old-age dependency ratios. I doubt there are even 5.1 million.4Astute readers might notice that I’ve been careful to use the term “old-age dependency ratio” rather than “dependency ratio.” Dependency ratios are not actually about age, they’re about productivity. Children and the elderly are much less able to take care of themselves. But being old or young is not the only way to be unproductive.Fiscal effects: paying the pensionsThe most immediate problem caused by population aging is that almost every wealthy country, and some middle income countries such as Brazil and Argentina, are paying out a large and growing fraction of GDP as pensions (or equivalents like Social Security). Italy, which by virtue of not having had much of a Baby Boom is one of the world’s oldest countries, currently leads the pack at 16.3% of GDP. This requires high levels of growth-stifling taxation, and greatly reduces the state’s fiscal room to maneuver in case of war or emergency.Pension expenditures and share older than 65 by OECD country in 2018. Note Japan’s comparatively cheap pensions and Poland, Brazil and Argentina’s expensive ones. Source.Democracies naturally tend towards vote-buying, and paying off current voters with the earnings of future generations who cannot vote is a winning strategy. This creates a Ponzi scheme in which huge fractions of state budgets are redistributed from current workers to retirees in ways that require an ever-growing number of workers to be sustainable. Productivity gains don’t usually help, because the expected living standards of retirees, often enforced by law, rise with productivity.Change in real purchasing power by age group in Spain since 2008. Every group under 65 has gotten poorer; only pensioners’ living standards are improving. Source.As countries age due to longer life expectancies and sub-replacement fertility, costs spiral upwards. All of this is compounded by high elderly voting rates and the increasing elderly share of the population, which makes reform extremely politically costly—even Vladimir Putin had trouble raising the retirement age by a few years to compensate for Russia’s rising life expectancy.Direct fiscal effects. The “solution” to population ageing embraced by most European and Anglosphere governments has been allowing immigration to keep pension costs manageable. We’ve already seen that immigration barely matters for population aging, but there’s an even simpler reason why this doesn’t work: immigrants and their children are a fiscal cost, not a benefit. This is clearest in Denmark, which keeps very precise records of public benefits used and taxes paid.Average net contribution to public finances by year in Denmark. MENAPT migrants are a cost at all ages. Danes and Westerners have a null effect, while other immigrants are a net negative despite contributing during their years of peak earnings. Source.While other countries don’t have publicly-available data this granular, simple models of taxes paid and benefits used show that the same pattern exists in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Austria. Every developed country in the world has a progressive taxation system and substantial redistribution via the welfare state. The precise threshold varies by country, but in general you need to have above-median (60th to 80th percentile) lifetime earnings to have a null effect on state finances, and above that (in the US, 90th percentile) to have a positive one. Immigrants, who on average have lower IQs and worse local language skills than their native counterparts, tend to be low earners when they work at all. This gets worse in the second generation, as better language skills and cultural assimilation are more than compensated for by greater eligibility for benefits, as well as the costs of education.Unsurprisingly, there is a very strong correlation between an immigrant group’s performance in one European country and their performance in another. There is no magic cultural or policy sauce to make certain groups productive. Source.It’s often claimed that this only applies in Europe, and that in America the median immigrant is a fiscal positive thanks to the US’s looser labor market laws, smaller welfare state and better sources of immigrants (Mexicans being more productive than Muslims, and non-Latin American immigration being strongly positively selected). But it’s not true. The US, by virtue of its very progressive taxation system, is actually more redistributive than European countries, not less.Net redistribution to the bottom 50% by country. The US tax system relies heavily on steeply-progressive income taxes, rather than consumption taxes like the VAT, which makes it highly redistributive. Source.This means low earners are even more of a fiscal drag in the US than they are in Europe. The median immigrant household5 uses more welfare programs6 and earns less than the median American household. If the median immigrant household were a fiscal positive, this would imply the median American household is a fiscal positive. But given the colossal size of the budget deficit, this simply cannot be true.Welfare use by head-of-household status and program. Due to higher use by blacks and Hispanics, if you split by race, the gap would be even bigger. Illegals collect welfare via fraud or on behalf of their citizen children. Source.Unlike with Europe, it’s not obvious if immigration as a whole is a fiscal positive or negative for the United States (because the US system is so progressive, one software engineer can pay for a lot of fruit pickers, to say nothing of Elon Musk). But the median and marginal immigrant, which is what matters for policy, is certainly a net negative. Trying to fix a budget deficit with immigration is like trying to cure dehydration by drinking sea water.Indirect Fiscal Effects. There’s the more sophisticated claim that, while immigrants are direct fiscal negatives, they have indirect positive effects that outweigh them. If five Mexicans become construction workers, this frees up the Americans they replace to become managers or white collar workers, thereby earning more money, paying more taxes and compensating for the direct fiscal effect. The median Somali household in the Netherlands may cost the state a million euros over the course of their lifetime, but the new economic opportunities opened up by their presence will more than compensate for that. This is plausible in the abstract, but doesn’t hold in practice. Gregory Cochran lays out the intuition:Imagine a country with an average IQ of 100, some average amount of education (with some distribution), some average amount of capital per head (with some distribution of ownership of capital). Now add immigrants – 10% of the population – that are the same in every way. Same average IQ, same distribution of IQ, same average amount of capital and same distribution. They speak the same language. They have similar political traditions. In other words, it is as if the US had just peacefully annexed an imaginary country that’s a lot like Canada.Would the original inhabitants gain economically from this merger? Strikes me that this could only happen from economies of scale – since nothing has changed other than a 10% increase in overall size. There might be some diseconomies of scale as well. I wouldn’t expect a big payoff. Except for Nawapa, of course.Contrast this with a situation in which the extra 10% is fairly different – lower average IQ, much less education on average, don’t speak English. They don’t bring along a lot of capital. They have and bring along their native political traditions, like everyone, but theirs stink. I can easily see how those immigrants might have improved their economic lot but it’s kind of hard to see how bringing in people with low human capital benefits the original citizens more than bringing in people with considerably higher human capital. Yet it must, because adding more of the same clearly has a small effect, while adding in lower-skilled must have a big positive effect. Practically all the economists say so.In other words, the supposed benefits from immigration are a special case of the benefits from a larger market: more opportunities for specialization, more competition, more innovation (which scales easily) and so on. But when we look at the world, there’s no connection between population and living standards. People understand this intuitively. No one is really shocked that Iceland (population: 396,000) or New Zealand (population: 5,252,000) are far wealthier than India (population: 1,459,153,000). In practice, ideas and goods cross borders easily, reducing the importance of internal market size, and the minimum population size required for the specialization needed in a modern economy is small.Correlation between population size and per-capita GDP in 2022. India and China are excluded. The United States is the only large country with high living standards. The point is not that larger population size means lower living standards, but that size is irrelevant compared to things like composition. This also holds within Europe; Germany is not dramatically richer than Denmark. SourceIf adding additional Swedes to Sweden does not make existing Swedes more productive and less dependent on the state, adding additional Syrians is certainly not going to.Political effects. All these analyses take “the system” for granted; they assume the benefits, spending, and tax structure of society are fixed (this is a very common error in economics, because precisely predicting system change is so difficult). But all Western countries have open political systems where foreigners can naturalize, then vote, run for office, and become activists, bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, journalists and professors. In other words, they can change the system.Consider the 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigration wave from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States. At the time, the US had virtually no welfare state, and the immigrants in question were whites of similar ability to ethnic Americans. Fiscally speaking, this should have been a slam-dunk for the United States government, and indeed it was—initially.But the Ellis Island wave powered both the 1932 New Deal (which was far more radical than what FDR ran on) and, even more importantly, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, durably shifting America’s political spectrum to the left. These initiatives, particularly Medicaid and the Medicare and Social Security expansions of the Johnson administration, are responsible for modern America’s fiscal woes.White Catholics and Jews, descendants of the 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigration wave, formed the core of the Democratic Party in the United States from 1932 to 2008. This is even more true at the elite level (donors, ideologues, judges) because blacks were very underrepresented. Source.Unsurprisingly, given the persistence of traits, a huge influx of European migrants Europeanized the American political system, shifting it from one based on limited government and sectional politics to one based on social democracy and left–right ideological politics. Indeed, there is a strong association across US counties between the immigrant fraction 1910-1930 and support for welfare spending today.Given the convergence of the United States and Europe over the course of the 20th century, this may seem trivial, but it didn’t at the time. In the words of Senator David Reed, defending the Immigration Act of 1924:There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.Notably, it only began to have a major effect on politics in 1928 with the nomination of Al Smith (the first Roman Catholic nominee for president), after immigration was cut off. This is because it took decades for non-English speaking, often non-citizen immigrants to be integrated into the US political system. If a researcher in 1920 had done a simple fiscal analysis of the immigration wave, they would’ve found it was positive (since the US had almost no welfare state). But the wave’s direct effects were dwarfed in the long run by its indirect political effects; the immigrants and their descendants had the power to change the system, and did. As seen with Senator Reed (or with H. P. Lovecraft), this was both predictable and predicted ahead of time, but could not have been precisely modeled until it happened.With that in mind, in which Western countries do immigrants and their descendants support left-wing parties that want to expand state spending? All of them.Second generation immigrants are significantly to the left of the native population across the EU–21. Non-European immigrants are more left-wing than European ones. I assume the US case is familiar. Source.And looking at partisanship actually understates the true effects, because when the median voter becomes more in favor of spending, anti-spending parties have to change their platforms to remain competitive.The 2024 rise in Hispanic support for the Republican Party (which shouldn’t be overstated) illustrates this. Rather than Hispanics starting to vote Republican because they’ve gotten less supportive of redistribution, the Republican Party has remained competitive by becoming more pro-spending, especially on entitlements. Source.Because the political effects of immigration shift the system itself toward more spending in the long-term7, analyses of current fiscal effects within the existing framework are a very loose lower bound for the true fiscal impact of immigration.Living standardsOkay, but maybe the allocative benefits of a larger labor force and the innovative benefits of more brains will raise living standards. If this were true, you would expect to see flows of migration within countries towards concentrations of immigrants.8 In fact, you would expect this even if the true effect of immigration on living standards9 were null because the same economic factors that draw international migrants also draw internal migrants. But this isn’t what you see. Whether at the province, city, or neighborhood level, when immigrants move in, natives leave.This chart shows gross value added per worker relative to the national average on the x-axis and net internal migration on the y-axis, by region. A positive slope means citizens of this country move from less to more productive areas, and a negative slope means they move from more to less productive areas. In high immigration countries, people move away from centers of economic opportunity. This is the opposite of what you’d expect and what you see in low-immigration countries like Japan. Source.You would also expect to see mass immigration from the First World to the Third, to take advantage of the allocative benefits of low-skill labor. Someone who might be a cashier in the US could move to Brazil and enter the upper-middle class. But instead, we see Third World elites moving to the First World. Why? The simple answer is that national IQ is the strongest predictor of GDP per capita10, and, conditional on GDP per capita, of future economic growth. It is also a strong predictor of almost every other thing you would guess contributes to living standards.National IQ versus log GDP per capita. Unlike with population size, there is a very strong positive correlation and good reason to believe it is causal. Source.There are several mechanisms at work here. More intelligent people are more competent and capable of carrying out a given role effectively, better at innovation, better at cooperating with each other, and better at understanding economic thinking and market logic.11 The result is that the effect of national IQ on national income is several times larger than the effect of individual IQ on individual income (each IQ point is associated with a 1–2% increase in individual income versus a 6–8% increase in GDP per capita). In other words, high intelligence has large positive externalities and low intelligence has large negative externalities.With that in mind, it’s essential to understand that immigration lowers national IQ in every Western country except Australia.Effects of immigration on national IQ. It compares the national PISA averages with and without first- and second-generation immigrants. Note that this is affected by both the native/immigrant gap and the level of immigration. Also note that third-generation and beyond are counted as natives. Ukraine and Australia are very slight beneficiaries, while the Gulf States, whose wealth and attraction come from oil rather than native human capital, are large beneficiaries. Every other country’s national IQ is lowered by immigration.We should expect this to be the default outcome of immigration if:In a post-Malthusian world without central planning, the main determinant of economic development is the characteristics of the population (of which IQ is the most easily measurable and important, though not the only one).These characteristics are persistent and differences don’t disappear with cultural assimilation (they are, because like almost all human traits they are substantially genetic).Immigrants generally move for economic reasons, and thus from poorer to wealthier countries.We would therefore expect immigration to impoverish the destination countries, unless there is strong positive selection (sufficient to overcome both regression towards the mean and the gap between populations), which in a world of cheap and easy transportation requires heavy restrictions.12National powerForeigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners.—Alexander HamiltonAgainst the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.—George WashingtonAnother argument is that a higher population is needed to “beat China” (“at what” is usually left unsaid) or otherwise increase the geopolitical power of the state (e.g., “immigration is America’s superpower”).13 The idea is that a larger population means a larger (absolute) economy and military, and therefore more heft on the international stage. Hence immigration is in the interests of the state even if it isn’t in the interests of the citizenry. This relies implicitly on a “citizens-as-subjects” perspective.I reject this framing (states exist to serve us, not the other way around), but even taking it for granted, it misses that the realist view of the state is wrong. States are not unitary actors pursuing the instrumentally-rational objective of power (the national interest). They are ruled by domestic politics, and immigration produces special interests that make foreign policy in the “national interest” difficult. The classic example of this is Florida Cubans.14 The US cannot have a foreign policy towards Cuba based on the US national interest because of the large and electorally influential Cuban diaspora. Multiply this across every world region and what you get is state paralysis. Ethnic lobbies are one of the biggest reasons the American founders were skeptical of immigration; they didn’t want American policy determined by foreign interests. Their concerns were prescient: the governments of China, India, and Mexico all openly view their diasporas as tools to influence the politics of other states.Even more importantly, internal conflict is debilitating. States that are insufficiently united against outsiders are playgrounds or battlefields for foreign powers, not actors in their own right. The classic example here is China15 during the Century of Humiliation. China possessed an enormous and competent population, but was impotent against much smaller, but more cohesive, foreign powers (Japan did not even have a technological advantage during the first Sino-Japanese war). One of the most reliable findings in all the social sciences is that ethnic diversity causes social conflict, and that the more different different groups are, the more conflict. Ethnic conflict is not the only source of internal division, but it is an unusually important and persistent one, which is why homogeneity is invaluable for any state. Influence abroad depends on unity at home.When times are good, ethnic conflicts can be brushed under the rug. But when things fall apart, homogenous nation-states rise from the ashes, while multiethnic conglomerations fracture and disappear. There is a reason why the nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe and East Asia emerged from the cataclysms of the World Wars16 and the fall of Communism, while the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia fell to pieces and are confined to the dustbin of history. When national power is a priority, there is a reasonable expectation things might go wrong.Furthermore, how much a state can get out of its people depends on how legitimate those people see it as. The pattern in modern Western countries is that, no matter how welcomed or privileged they are, minorities view the state as a hostile and foreign imposition, while the state-forming ethnic group becomes demoralized. Britain is the extreme case of this (famously, more British Muslims joined ISIS than the British Army), but it also applies to the US. In 2021, 58% of US whites considered themselves very patriotic, while only 37% of blacks, 36% Hispanics, and 28% of Asians did.Take the precise numbers with a grain of salt. As is often the case with polling, different wording can change them a lot. It’s the rank order and size of the gaps that matters. Despite women, Democrats and Asians being more educated, there’s no education polarization, which suggests that college-educated Republican whites are exceptionally patriotic. Source.Lastly and most importantly, the point of national power is to stop hostile foreigners from exerting power over you. The traditional way to lose power to foreigners is military force, but if they’re just given visas, military strength is irrelevant. From the rhetoric of immigrant intellectuals in the US to the constant terror attacks in Europe to the horrific anti-white Pakistani rape-gangs of Britain17, it’s clear that much of actually-existing immigration is no different from an invasion where we have chosen to surrender without a fight.18Hostility is one of those things that’s difficult to quantify, but this political position qualifies as such. Nearly half of young Hispanic respondents believe that whites should be second-class citizens who can only be hired after racial minorities are considered. Given US nuclear weapons and the oceans, it’s very hard to see what could be worse than giving over the country (peacefully) to people who think this way. Source.Using actually-existing immigration to prop up the power of the state recalls the parable of the two economists who paid each other $1000 to eat faeces (thus boosting GDP by $2000). You’re increasing a certain measure of national power (population size), but forgetting that the purpose of power is to improve the lives of citizens.Ethnic and personal continuityWhen writing about fertility, I and many other writers tend to frame things in terms of living standards or national power, as these are legible to a broad audience. But this is not how people usually think of their own children. People want children for their own sake, as a link in a chain stretching from the past to the future. From a Darwinian perspective, this is clearly adaptive. Immigration makes personal continuity marginally19 harder. There are two reasons. First, immigration increases experienced population density and drives up housing prices, both of which reduce fertility. Second, no matter what the population of your country, the number of people you personally know will be about the same, as will the number of people you interact with by default (coworkers, classmates, and so on). Assortative mating is the rule, meaning that the less like you (i.e. the more diverse) this fixed-sized social circle is, the harder it will be to find a husband or wife.2021Some evidence for this. Canada, with its exceptionally high levels of immigration, has seen a much sharper fertility decline in recent years than Europe or the United States. SourceAnd as with personal continuity, people care about ethnic continuity for its own sake. They do not like the idea that, even if their genes may be propagated into the future, their culture and collective identity will vanish. This can be explained by cultural/historical reasons (groups that did not instill mechanisms of propagation into their members did not survive to the present), as well as Darwinian ones (individuals without groups to back them up get predated upon by more cohesive groups).This simulation shows the individualist case for caring about the group. Individuals who betray their group members or act selfishly lose to ethnocentrists because they can’t cooperate. Meanwhile, universalist humanitarians get taken advantage of by everyone else. Source.Actually-existing immigration is a much bigger threat to ethnic continuity than low fertility. Low fertility alone can only destroy very small ethnic groups like the Parsis. On current trends, there will still be 70 million Japanese by 2100, and that leaves centuries for another wild fertility swing to turn things around before extinction. Mass immigration is much faster. In every Western country with mass immigration, there’s a constant drumbeat of “anyone can be X,” “X is a nation of immigrants,” and “X does not exist” – all sentiments denying the boundaries of an ethnic group and therefore both its existence and capacity for collective action. Multiculturalism is asymmetric.This is even more true on a genetic level. Without strong legal or social barriers against intermixing (which do not exist) physical proximity guarantees the disappearance of genetically-distinct groups (in animals, this is known as genomic extinction). This can happen fast: a simple simulation based on existing rates of fertility and intermarriage in the US today shows that >95% white individuals could nearly disappear within four generations given current levels of immigration.This simulation assumes immigration falls by 20% each generation. Source.Essentially the entire population becomes admixed, despite significant racial preferences. The classic example of this is Latin America, especially the Southern Cone and Brazil, which are majority-European genetically and saw significant post-colonial European immigration but have almost no unadmixed whites today. Historically, the US avoided this with the One Drop Rule, which is why the average non-Hispanic US white today is 99.8% European genetically. Genomic extinction means the permanent loss of the traits that underly culture and distinguish ethnic groups.22 If saving the white rhino or bowhead whales from extinction is a good thing, why not Italians or Germans or Irish, all threatened by mass immigration?23ConclusionsContemporary mass migration does little to slow population aging, worsens government finances, lowers living standards, has at-best ambiguous effects on national power, and threatens personal and ethnic continuity. It is no more a solution to population decline than defunding tax collection is a solution to government deficits. But this doesn’t mean the problems of population decline go away. Some actual solutions include:Hoping technological advances bail us out. The Great Stagnation is real and “ordinary” productivity advancements won’t cut it, but something like anti-aging, AGI24 or biosingularity25 would.Copying the Japanese. This means more retirees working and lower pensions. Japan is often framed as a cautionary tale against the dangers of xenophobia, but this framing is 20 years out of date. Since 2008, high-immigration Western Europe and the ultra-high immigration non-US Anglosphere have both stagnated badly. Growth among advanced economies has mostly been either US growth or catch-up growth by high-IQ post-Communist ethnostates (Eastern Europe and above all China). This is why there is a negative correlation between economic growth and population growth among advanced economies in the 21st century. For all its problems, Japan has cheap housing in desirable areas, sophisticated industry and exports, a unique and world-beating national culture, and levels of public order lost 60 years ago in the West. There are worse fates. Barring a technological miracle or higher fertility, the options on offer are not stagnation and homogeneity verdsus immigration and dynamism; they are Japan versus Lebanon.Raising birth rates. I’ve written about this elsewhere. This would work, though there would be a generation of pain where a small number of adults would have to support large numbers of both seniors and children.“We need immigration because of low birth rates” is a rhetorical zombie that needs to die. Do not let innumerate and ignorant commentators get away with it.Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization. You can find more of his writings at his blog Not With A Bang or at his Twitter.Support Aporia with a paid subscription:AporiaSocial science. Philosophy. Culture.You can also follow us on Twitter.1It is not prima facie obvious that population decline per se is bad. Fewer people means more land per person, less environmental pollution caused by human activity, and the capital investments of the past (whether that be roads, factories, or above all houses) being shared among fewer people. There are good reasons overpopulation used to be a major fear, though I think this sentiment is misguided today outside of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.2I specify “actually-existing immigration” because there is no such thing as Immigrasia. The concerns in this article do not apply to all immigrants or all possible forms of immigration, but they do apply to the ones we actually have, right now, in the real world.3By comparison, the labor force participation rate for the working-age population is 78% in the United States (versus 83% in Canada and 89% in Sweden), meaning there’s ample scope to achieve a 2% increase with zero immigration (OECD). To the extent that immigration reduces workforce participation rates by lowering wages and making certain jobs low-status, it may even reduce the working fraction of the population.4This gets even worse if you look to the future. Latin America and India are below replacement fertility. The only places that will keep expanding into the mid-century are Africa and the most backward part of the Muslim world. Even if the demographic Ponzi scheme worked in the short term (it doesn’t), we would only be kicking the can down the road.5It’s important to look at the household, not the individual, as the unit, because these programs are usually claimed on behalf of citizen children. The same applies to other costs like education. An extremely common rhetorical trick used by immigration advocates is to put this spending in the “native” column, which makes the “native” column look worse and the “immigrant” column look better. But these people being citizens and eligible for programs and education is a result of immigration. The costs of native-born children of immigrants need to be included as costs of immigration. Governments that rely on these projections reliably end up with both a lot more immigration and a lot more debt.6An even dirtier trick, as seen here by the Cato and the Manhattan Institute, is to pretend military, welfare, and entitlement spending is fixed and not related to immigration (or total GDP or government revenue), thereby putting these massive costs in the “native” column and removing the largest costs from the “immigrant” column. If you ignore by far the largest sources of government spending and everything after the first generation, immigration looks fiscally great. This bears no relation to reality.7Richard Hanania and the Cato institute have argued that, by reducing social trust, diversity actually reduces redistribution. Setting aside the question of whether or not a society where people distrust each other is worth lower redistribution (there is a strong positive correlation between social trust and GDP per capita, and good reason to believe this is causal in both directions as it allows people to do things like hire unrelated employees and not expensively inspect every single shipment for fraud), this is factually wrong. Main effects dominate diversity effects: the direct effect of adding more pro-redistribution immigrants to the population vastly outweighs the indirect effect of making natives slightly more opposed to redistribution. And even granting the premise, immigration doesn’t stop at the “hormetic dose” required to make the natives oppose redistribution. The more immigration, the more special interests that benefit from it and the harder it is to stop, and folk-socialist immigrants quickly overwhelm marginally more right-wing natives. See California.8In fact, you do see this with some historical examples. Cities in Germany that hosted Huguenot refugees attracted more internal migration and grew faster than those that didn’t, because the Huguenots brought rare and valuable skills and were not especially objectionable to the Germans. When I say “immigrants,” I’m referring to modern-day immigration in aggregate unless otherwise specified. An immigrant is just someone who relocates across national borders, not a coherent group of people, and there’s tremendous variation within that extremely broad category.9Living standards are much broader than GDP per capita or personal income, though they are highly correlated with them. Some things not captured by those two measures include physical safety, noise levels, infrastructure quality and the language of local signs, all of which impact quality of life. I think trying to enumerate, weigh, and precisely measure everything that goes into living standards is a fool’s errand, but you can look at people’s revealed preferences to see how they move.10I’ve seen the argument that even if low IQ immigration reduces GDP per capita, every individual is still better off (because you’re adding a poor person, but nobody’s income is reduced). Refer to the previous argument about internal mobility. If this were true, “white flight” and its equivalents wouldn’t be such a universal phenomenon.11Economists like Bryan Caplan and Garett Jones often bemoan the ignorance of the American electorate, and blame this for bad policy. Now imagine the policies of a country where the electorate has 10 fewer IQ points. We could call it “Bexico.” Further, assume that we have the option of letting millions of “Bexicans” into the state of California. What would we expect the effect on California’s government to be?12No one has any problem with this argument if you frame it in an immigration-flattering way, like looking at the effects of European immigration to Brazil, or if you frame it in a way flattering to left-wing sensibilities, like pointing out the negative long-term effects of the African slave trade.13Putting this in a footnote because it’s not that important, but I get the sense that the people who make this argument envision themselves as court viziers standing at the head of a vast imperium, for whom the glory of the state is of paramount concern and citizens are subjects whose purpose is to serve the Leviathan. I strongly disagree with this viewpoint. The state should exist for the benefit of individuals and not the other way around. India has more geopolitical power than Iceland, but I claim Iceland is the superior society. And even if we allow that Iceland can remain sovereign purely thanks to a generous United States-backed security architecture, the “minimum viable state” for defense against outsiders in the nuclear age still only requires a white or East Asian population in the millions; think Cold War Israel or apartheid-era South Africa or North Korea (operating at a tiny fraction of what it’s capable of thanks to central planning).14The Israel Lobby, Dearborn Arabs and Palestine, and the US’s shameful treatment of our greatest ally Britain during the Troubles thanks to diaspora Irish support for the IRA, are other examples that immediately come to mind.15But far from the only one: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire, and 100 Years War France also come to mind.16Worth emphasizing: Germany lost a quarter of an entire generation of men (sex ratio among Germans 25–49 in 150: 0.77), had most of its cities bombed flat, a quarter of the country occupied by the Soviets and separated from the rest, and lost all foreign assets after WWII. 20 years later and Germany was the wealthiest large country in Europe and the second wealthiest in the world (after the US), with a strong military, and the world’s fourth largest economy. Japan is similar. Nation-states can bounce back quickly even from epochal disasters.17Also note the cheering-on of these rape gangs by non-Pakistanis. I came across this example today. It’s impossible to argue with a straight face that you need to welcome people cheering mass gang rape for the national interest.18Some instructive quotes from immigrant youth robbers in Sweden, via Inquisitive Bird. “When we're downtown robbing, we're fighting, we're fighting against the Swedes!” Another says: “Power to me is that the Swedes must look at me, lie down on the ground, and kiss my feet.” They view Swedes, who have given them refuge, privileges, welfare, and a far better society than they ever could have built, as enemies to be defeated and humiliated.19I don’t want to exaggerate the effect size here: it’s real but homogeneity doesn’t solve low fertility or even come close. Sex relations are far more important.20Even if you, personally, are a rabid xenophile, most of your prospective partners are not.21A recent study claims that racial diversity explains 20-44% of US fertility decline since 1970, and that this mechanism is responsible. I think this number is too high and driven by unmeasured confounding (specifically, by leftism/secularism/urbanism), but that the direction of the effect is correct.22In the case of whites, it also means the loss of the far-right tail of intellectual and non-intellectual mental ability, which is absolutely essential for scientific accomplishment. Given the overwhelming importance of whites (and the irrelevance of Latin America, the best point of comparison) to science both historically and today, this would cripple science, perhaps permanently. But this is a race-specific argument; people value ethnic continuity for its own sake, not just because ethnic groups have unique strengths.23A caveat here is that, in cases where groups are genetically indistinguishable, true assimilation does happen. This is why internal migration from Germanophone Switzerland to lower fertility Francophone Switzerland didn’t historically threaten the latter. A child of a Germanophone Swiss who speaks French and is acculturated to Francophone norms is indistinguishable from other Francophone Swiss. This strengthened the Francophone Swiss as a group and helped keep linguistic proportions constant within Switzerland. Much historical European immigration to the US or France is similar. But as with the Huguenots, this does not apply to modern day immigration in the aggregate.24There are a lot of ways for this to go wrong, whether that be the classic MIRI scenario of a misaligned singleton superintelligence tiling the universe with some alien goal, or the Hanson/Land scenario of a return to Malthusianism due to everything human being ground away to nothing in the crucible of perfect competition (see also: Gradual Disempowerment), or the Intelligence Curse scenario of a handful of AI elites and/or institutions that no longer have any need for humans killing, disempowering, or impoverishing everyone else. However, humans becoming irrelevant does have the advantage of problems such as low fertility and population decline becoming irrelevant.25Biosingularity, as the name implies, is the biological analogue to AI singularity. Rather than smarter machines that design smarter machines that design smarter machines, you have smarter humans coming up with more effective ways to increase human intelligence. To take the politically and technologically easiest effective method, Gwern has calculated that simple embryo selection for IQ could improve IQ by about 10 points per generation. This is a much slower and much safer process than an AI singularity. (Many parents have children smarter than them right now, and it generally works out fine for both parents and children. Trying to improve IQ by 10 standard deviations in a generation would probably cause problems, but <1 standard deviation per generation keeps things within-distribution).All of the problems except continuity mentioned in this article are obviated by +10 IQ points per generation. A country that did this would see rapid economic growth and improvement in living standards and national power even with a declining population (imagine Brazil turning into Germany in a single generation). Embryo-selected IVF already exists and has been used; the limiting factor is the low power of existing polygenic scores for intelligence and health. The easiest way for a government to promote this would be funding the creation of large sample size high-quality polygenic scores for intelligence, health, and other desirable traits.190Share this postAporiaImmigration does not solve population declineCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore2332SharePreviousDiscussion about this postCommentsRestacksRealist2dLiked by Aporia"Making a state’s population go up for the sake of it is meaningless paper-clip maximizing."Indeed, it is. As always, quality over quantity.Expand full commentReplyShareMA_browsing2dLiked by AporiaGreat article.  I agree with every point being made here, and I also appreciate the sensible comparison of AI-risk with much existentially safer bio-enhancement options.Expand full commentReplyShare1 reply21 more comments...TopLatestDiscussionsNo postsReady for more?Subscribe© 2025 Aporia MagazinePrivacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice Start WritingGet the appSubstack is the home for great cultureShareCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore                                                                                                                                                                    This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts