You know, many eastern countries apparently intuitively think in cycles. The west tends to think linearly: "We're trending upwards, argh argh overpopulation, famine, death. We're trending downwards, argh argh population collapse, famine, death".
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
I do find it funny that some folks treat this is like the complete end of Japan (or whatever) nation, like you said a straight line down. But eventually it will bottom out and potentially rebound a bit. It find on the way up or at the top, and it will be fine at the bottom once the trends return but the issue really is the pain of the phase shift.
you can still grow even with smaller richer more productive population, actually you are encouraged to be more productive with smaller population than vice versa
Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions.
Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
The unfortunate flip side of this is that when you bring in a lot of immigrants, it can keep a lot of markets pumped up far beyond what the markets would usually dictate.
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.
> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any.
Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
> Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children?
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.
So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
US fertility rates first fell below replacement in 1972, falling to 1.8 by 1984, then rising back above replacement by 2007, then falling to 1.79 today. Despite being below replacement for 53 of the last 54 years, overall US population has never declined.
> Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
How do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%.
Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
The average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial.
Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.
Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).
It only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
I didn't say that 1500 years ago is a short timeframe. I'm saying that if you look at short timeframes like a decade or a generation or two it may look like there's not much migration going on. But stretch that a bit, and you'll see the changes. It's like a slow-moving river. Always moving, if you yourself move your viewpoint back a little.
Fair enough, that's not insignificant. As a German, I feel sorry that you feel the UK got flooded with my people, as they are one of the biggest part of the immigrants.
My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.
Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.
The US opened the border significantly during the Biden administration and it caused plenty of issues worth worrying about. I think that is a good example of opening the floodgates. But if you mean only in terms of affecting the population numbers then prob irrelevant.
> Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population
And especially in Japan. It's truly insane how important this is to Japanese people when there's barely any immigrants on their island. Right-wing rhetoric really does a number on your brain.
> There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman.
Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.
The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]
Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
> weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
In the united states the birthrate problem is largely climate change panic (which is not a reason to not have kids because other populations / immigrants start accelerating their birth rates), and then because of heavy migration and other market factors, home prices have skyrocketed. Many couples don't want to have kids until they at least buy their "starter house".
I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
I guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.
Neither immigrants nor robots will prevent them from becoming essentially extinct as an ethno-national group if they don't do something serious to stimulate the fertility rate. They need to find the root of why Japanese aren't having kids and resolve it.
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
I suspect part of the problem is that people are worked hard and don't really have a vision of the future that they are actively building towards as a nation. Hard work alone doesn't dissuade people from having kids but not having a positive or even constant future target combined with that can cause folks to just give up on that kind of aspiration.
This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.
Children cost hundred's of thousands of dollars to raise, and that doesn't even count the opportunity cost of your own career progression as you have to spend a year of sleepless nights and possibly have one or both parents reduce their work hours to care for the child.
The Japanese government already struggles to pay out pensions with its aging population, healthcare and pension costs are both rising, where do you propose the money for this comes from?
Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
But the real cost of giving birth is not the giving birth, it's the millions of yen you then need to spend over the next 18 years to raise and educate the child, not to mention the cost of possibly dying during childbirth.
> Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Yes
> Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
Yes
> If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
Yes and no. There are a zillion different support programs where you have to fill out a 4 page form in triplicate and submit to city hall to get $80 3 months later. Childbirth is induced regardless of medical necessity because there's one programme that covers medical costs up to the scheduled due date and another programme that covers medical costs after birth, but if you need medical care after your due date with the baby still unborn then you fall through the cracks. The country badly needs to replace its patchwork subsidy program with simply including childbirth under normal medical insurance.
It is not as simple as that. In my country giving birth is free. And you get economic support for every child. For most people it's still an economic burden to some extent, but for the majority it's not something which blocks them from having children. It's more that most families I know are content with having two children. It feels fine to them. But that's the families that do have children. 25% of men in my country never have children. It's not enough. A lot of families need to produce 3 children, and better if there are some with four.. and most people simply don't want that. And that's for the most part not a question of economy.
It is as simply as that. Economic support you mentioned is never enough to cover basic needs. Better than nothing, but still require to sacrifice a lot to have an extra kid.
More kids means you need a bigger house, bigger car, extra furniture, a part time job for mother to manage kids.
I specifically mentioned families where the economy is not a burden, and they still don't want many children. Very few will want more than two. Please note that in my country at least, as long as the economy is good enough that there aren't any real problems living, then it doesn't matter if it costs more with more children. That is not the reason.
And there are the increasing infertility rates as well to hamper the efforts.
Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.
I suspect this is why China is going in so hard of humanoid robots over the last few years. They have seen a potential future in Japan and are now trying to avoid this at all costs. It is big long term bet but we will know if it worked in about 20-40 years.
>But a strict zero-immigration policy collides with one terrifying reality: No country in history has successfully reversed a falling fertility rate, and Japan shows zero signs of breaking that trend.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
The worldometer statistics site doesn't fully agree with that, the Guardian reports that the rate went from 0.75 to 0.80, while worldometer states that the 2026 rate will probably end up at 0.76. At best this has kind of stopped dropping, but it is any case catastrophically low (and way worse than Japan)
I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?
A few of the comments in question have a bad tone - but most of them are reasonable opinions about valuing one's people, culturally or socially, or about the effectiveness of immigration.
I’ve noticed this too. I think it started around the time of the first round of big tech layoffs in the US, and when the US ratcheted up the price for H1B(?) visas.
Seems like economic uncertainty or fear of it breeds xenophobia. Who knew
The article paints immigration as something undoubtedly negative:
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
I am not at all concerned about this problem. At this point, society mostly need people as consumers, so quality is not as important as it used to be (in democratic countries it's a bit more complicated because people vote - but this is solvable too).
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
> The industry is shifting from rigid industrial arms to general-purpose robots powered by advanced AI
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.
What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.
Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
If you have a way to secure rice production, please let us know. Or did you mean to abandon rice because it's too labor intensive? There's a reason for subsidies, just as there are reasons for agricultural support in my home country - without it there would be no agriculture. And, without going into details, that would be a disaster.
The quantity of people isn't relevant, it's the quantity of people by age.
Older people, en masse, become a burden. If you add another 43 million people aged over 60 on top of your 43 million from 1900, suddenly that 86 million is less productive than the original 43 million.
Currently Japan has ~41 million people aged 0-40, ~41 million aged 40-60, and ~41 million aged 60+
This is an insane way to frame immigration reform. It isn’t “ceding” anything, it just means being OK that not every single person you know is the same race. Having some cultural exchange, growing as a person, learning about the world beyond your borders… these are virtues.
As an European living in Japan... no, Japan will not be fine. At least we Europeans are aware of our problems and try to look for solutions (whether we actually solve anything is another topic), the Japanese are masters of solving problems by ignoring them.
Their culture has a lot of good things, but also bad things that are leading then to the abyss, but if you watch Japanese media they never discuss any sensitive topic and always try to paint themselves as the best country in the world. Maybe they should start doing some self-criticism...
Sometimes I wonder how long it is possible to keep supporting properly senile people. Or those that need constant care. At some point unless there is some massive productivity increase in care it is just not realistic anymore.
They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others.
Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that.
The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war.
The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.
I think you're misunderstanding - "homogeneous" as a cultural description is a spatial metric, not a time metric. Homogeneous cultures indeed change across time, influenced by war and foreign media/languages, just like any culture. The point is not that they do or do not change, the point is that they do so together, largely.
>The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity
This, and race/culture, is what is meant when people say Japan is homogeneous compared to other developed nations.
I think you are confusing "homogeneous" with "indigenous". With the common meaning of "homogeneous" your entire post is a non sequitur. There are many different words ending with "-geneous" meaning entirely different things, you need to look at what goes before the "-genous" part.
I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.
> Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism?
I'll bite.
In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way.
We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street.
That analogy doesn't work well. Their situation involved foreign powers enforcing jurisdiction and property claims over their land with a regular standing army; a completely different situation than modern immigration
I certainly don't understand all you're saying through this tortured analogy, but yes an "army" of judges that issue rulings is much, much better than an army of soldiers that issue killings
And yet american culture and values are from it's dominant and founding group. All other groups were expected to assimilate and join the melting pot.
>>In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today.
I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this. As the locals, certainly didn't want what you imply and were defeated tribe by tribe.
> All other groups were expected to assimilate and join the melting pot.
I partially agree. Counter evidence is that Little Italy, Chinatowns and the like exist and have done for many decades. Ethnic clubs like Sons of Italy persist. Some Pennsylvania Dutch still don't speak English, and still set themselves apart. But at the same time, many from those groups join the majority culture and leave their old languages behind.
In this respect I don't see modern immigration in America any differently. Newer immigrant groups have their culture enclaves, but many from those groups also enter and adopt the majority culture.
> I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this
You're misreading my comment. For most of us, the locals at time of ancestor arrival had already displaced the natives to whom you refer
> the deep psychological truths about human tribalism
… that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one.
This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.
Yep, there is a lot of evidence that says even nomadic tribes heavily intermingled with others because it was seen as a means of building resilience for all.
The USA is pretty dang diverse, and definitely mixed. That mixing is a core part of it’s culture and history, actually. And now, the country that mixed (USA) is stronger than the Old World that didn’t (Europe).
Which is to say: There is no inherent psychological tribalism that makes having a diverse country impossible or ruinous; rather, this tribalism is manufactured and spread by hatemongers. The New World is a very good case study, here.
It's culture and values come from the dominant group. It didn't really mix equally between groups. If the dominant groups will shrink and another arises the values and the culture will change.
>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known.
If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
Doesn't sound fun though.First being conquered by Romans, then Anglo Saxons, then pillaged by Vikings and the conquered again by Normans.
I'm pretty sure where ever you come from that you have a dominant groups which imposes it's culture to every other subgroup. Every country where that is not the case, you infighting and war.
You are leaving out quite a bit of warfare, exploitation, rape, hatred, cultural erasure, colonization, slavers, serfdom, monarchy, religious conversion, religion erasure, and genocide in that pretty picture you paint as "All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere".
It is not necessarily true, I think it is opposite. More poorer they get, less attractive that place becomes. Especially since Japan is not rich with natural resources, there is nothing really to steal there
If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs.
There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal.
There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless.
When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later.
Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long.
> truths about human tribalism?
Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.
It isn't just about getting it above 2.0, it is having those people in the work force. Even if you could magic up enough babies today, it would be about 20 years until they would be actively offsetting the issue. The is why demographic issues are so insidious. The problems that keep birth rates down today, end up amplifying these issues in the future further suppressing them. Eventually you hit equilibrium but it is a long way down until you get there.
> They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.
Yes, because otherwise your economy and country collapse sooner or later. ie everyone dies. Why do think homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea are finally opening up the immigration floodgates? Because there’s currently no other choice. The other options (directly lowering the costs of child care, lowering work hours, robots, et al) still haven’t worked. Immigration buys you time.
If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
> If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
One big downside of any kind of social programs is that it conditions the population to rely solely on the state, thinking that their payments into the system will guarantee them safety. We tend to forget for a state to exist and to provide services, it needs people. Those people need to be born, raised and cultured in order to act as a community.
I think the point is we can't have our cake and eat it too.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
> They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point.
> And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
Also different cultures can withstand different level of hardships. With population decline what kind of quality of life drop we are talking about? Even if people get 2 times poorer, it is still way above than whatever people had in old times. That level can easily drop way further and people can adapt.
I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.
Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted. Work hard on making elderly care as easy as possible, automate automatable things. Importing people is just kicking the ageing population can down the road; these immigrant will grow old one day, and then what, import even more people?
For one generation, maybe. Once they've assimilated even a little (which is usually what you want, right?) they revert to the same birthrate as everyone else.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for.
More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works.
Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
Xenophobes, not racists. There is no race called 'muslim'. That this thread attracts comments from those who have migration-related problems high on their agenda is not that strange since it is dealing with the problems of the (absence of) migration. This subject has been polarised - not in the least by people calling anyone who does not agree a 'racist' - so some of the comments are extreme as well, viz. the grandparent comment about muslims and Indians.
Drop the knee-jerk 'muslims and indians are !"!"#%#¤', drop the 'racist! racist! racist!' and maybe, just maybe we can discuss the subject in a more productive manner. It does need discussing because neither 'close all the borders for anyone who does not look, speak, think or believe like me' nor 'open all the borders and welcome anyone who comes in' is a viable solution. Countries which do the former end up in the backwaters of history, those which do the latter end up as a footnote.
I thought this site catered to those a bit more discerning when it comes to discussing complex subjects but I seem to be mistaken. You do know the English language offers more than the few words you employ to have nuanced discussions?
Quite a fitting name you chose for yourself by the way.
No, not really. Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates. In case-study after case-study, it’s shown immigration has little to no impact on crime-rates. This was even disproven after the height of the Syrian refuge crisis! But media likes sensationalist reporting, so public perception doesn’t match the statistics.
> cultural demise.
Meaningless, also created by the media. If you listen to the media, Britain is under the fierce grip of Sharia law, enforced by… the 6% of the population that is Muslim. Yes, yes, how scary. I guess English culture was pretty weak, to meet its demise from such a meager blip.
>Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates.
This just isn't true. There are a lot of studies that purport this. There are also a lot of studies that purport the opposite. A quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime shows a bit of the field here.
The details get really important when talking about this. Details like:
- immigrant crime rates are often compared to non-immigrant rates, as if the native-born are a single bloc, rather than distinct segments
- "immigrants" treated as a single bloc
- immigrant crime getting controlled for by age, gender, income, and education --- which is cold comfort if the bulk of your immigration is poor uneducated young men
- first-gen immigrants, if immigrating to work, often have lower crime rates. This effect disappears with second-generation. But when they do crime, it is counted as native crime, rather than immigrant crime. That...doesn't quite cleave reality at the joints.
- labor law violations, tax evasion, etc., often not counted as "crime."
The thing is very simple: I am really not afraid of police in Germany. Worst thing that can happen is spending a night in jail. In other countries the police can shoot you or seriously beat you up. So basically there is no police. And the jail… well it’s all inclusive hotel compared to other countries. Deportation is anyway very unlikely. So what should stop me from doing bad things?
For one, this article doesn’t claim that immigration increases overall crime.
Secondly, the article hints at a sampling bias we have run into before, during the Syrian refugee crisis: Immigrants are not more likely compared to their peers.
If you compare a block that is predominately young men to the general population, they commit more crime – because they are young men, not because they are immigrants.
A proper statistical comparison looks at the sub-demographics, comparing immigrant and native folk to their peers in age and sex.
Compare 18-year old men from Algeria to native 18 year-old men, and they aren’t any more likely to commit crime. But between 18-year old men and the general population? Well, duh, because one group has more young men in it.
Which is to say: No, immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes.
First generation immigrants to the EU do not have higher rates of crime vs. natively born citizens. (Go ahead, google it). This is a far right talking point, but it simply not true.*
I am not going to debate on manipulation of one cherry picked number.
If your point is that crime hasn't risen up since EU started to receive "refugees" in droves, you are either not living in EU or prefer to ignore wider evidence dismissing it as "far-right talking point" (whatever that is)
>“The results are consistent with international research, according to which migration and refugee inflows have no systematic influence on crime in the host country.”
> Foreigners are overrepresented in the crime statistics compared to their share of the population. This is due to factors independent of origin
It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah to admit that migrants are commiting more crime per-capita, and then build a statistical model to try to claim that actually more migrants doesn't cause an increase in crime.
I live in Germany and crime has been falling significantly since the 1990s with clearance rates for crimes like murder at 93%+
It’s by far one of the safest countries in the world.
I think the way you phrase you reply makes it pretty clear where you stand emotionally and politically, so I won’t pretend that facts will change your mind, but alas.
So tired of hearing the same lies repeated over and over again in media.
> It’s by far one of the safest countries in the world.
It seriously puzzles me how one can carry the ridiculous thought. The only thing to advise here is perhaps to travel more - to countries like Singapore, Japan, Korea, Thailand and many other places where homelessness, rape, "refugee" with a knife on a street are not a part of everyday's life.
Germany was the safe country. When Germans lived there.
> I think the way you phrase you reply makes it pretty clear where you stand emotionally and politically, so I won’t pretend that facts will change your mind, but alas.
Instead of making emotional statements, would be great if you can actually bring facts you talking much of, but instead talking about your emotions. I would be extremely interested in "facts" explaining how importing criminals and uneducated 3rd world "refugees" actually made Germany (and rest of EU) safer.
And if you actually believe Berlin now is safer compared to Berlin in 90s, you can't be intellectually honest.
When I studied in Germany, my house was broken into by a Bosnian migrant neighbour. The entire thing was captured on CCTV and reported to the Polizei, and they did exactly nothing, claiming the CCTV footage “does not prove anything”. All my money in my wallet was taken.
Yeah since then I don’t trust the crime figures from Germany.
It's well known fact how Germany massages statistics to avoid any reference to "refugee" crime. Likely no other country in EU does so much shenanigans to hide the statistics
It's possible, but at this point we don't know yet how each will play out long term. EU chose to destroy itself fast, while Japan chose slow economic demise.
I am not sure tech approach is a right way to go if we project it at wider scale on a society or a country.
Society moves at way slower pace, and wrong turns may takes decades to rectify. Needless to say wrong turns may have horrible ramifications lasting decades as well.
If you'd ask me, I would certainly be against tech approach here. Lets leave it where it does play well.
It's perfectly natural for a country to experience periods of growth and decline. Demographic and economic cycles rise and fall over time, and a period of contraction does not mean growth won't return in the future.
What isn't reversible is losing a country's identity. As a foreigner, I'd rather see Japan remain Japan than become a messy cultural mix, like Europe.
You know, many eastern countries apparently intuitively think in cycles. The west tends to think linearly: "We're trending upwards, argh argh overpopulation, famine, death. We're trending downwards, argh argh population collapse, famine, death".
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
I do find it funny that some folks treat this is like the complete end of Japan (or whatever) nation, like you said a straight line down. But eventually it will bottom out and potentially rebound a bit. It find on the way up or at the top, and it will be fine at the bottom once the trends return but the issue really is the pain of the phase shift.
Yeah sure. It never happened that a great civilization completely collapsed.
I mean, Japan has been through a few 'collapses' in it's written history. The most recent arguably being in 1945.
Sure but I was thinking about more wide-scale collapses like Egyptians or Mayans.
and then the US invested heavily -- and still does, via military presence -- to build Japan back up to block the Soviets.
who will build them back up in the future? The Chinese would prefer to see them poor.
>> You know, many eastern countries apparently intuitively think in cycles.
"a turtle that retracts its head will later extend it"
Except in growth imperative system we have, to stop growing is not to not grow, it is to spiral into a cascade failure
And then? Either we think linearly: Crash into the rocks, game over. Or circular: difficult times ahead, we'll get through them again
you can still grow even with smaller richer more productive population, actually you are encouraged to be more productive with smaller population than vice versa
population growth ≠ wealth growth
Congrats you missed the point completely
There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman. Controlled immigration is different from opening the floodgates.
Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions. Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
(The worldometer site makes it easy to look up and compare various countries: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...)
The unfortunate flip side of this is that when you bring in a lot of immigrants, it can keep a lot of markets pumped up far beyond what the markets would usually dictate.
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
What solutions though?
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level. Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.
> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any. Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
> extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Always a bad idea to compare with the US which is known to have a terrible social net.
> The community support and available activities.
Interesting. Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children? That seems to be a huge pain point in Germany. Also child support is too low.
I agree that solutions might not be so simple that you can just "buy them". What you can buy at least is removing pain points and giving incentives.
> Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children?
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
It will only becomes worse over time, though.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
> no country has reversed its birth rate problem.
America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.
So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
So it hasn’t?
US fertility rates first fell below replacement in 1972, falling to 1.8 by 1984, then rising back above replacement by 2007, then falling to 1.79 today. Despite being below replacement for 53 of the last 54 years, overall US population has never declined.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-cha...
There’s years where the population declined due to migration, the long term trend is very much a net positive.
Recent policies have resulted in significant population decline, but so far they are just another blip.
> Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
How do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%.
Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
The average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial.
Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.
Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).
It only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
How is 1500 years ago a short time frame? Yeah, people moved, but how many people in what amount of time is important.
And places become more boring if the have the same migrants as every other place, not less boring.
I didn't say that 1500 years ago is a short timeframe. I'm saying that if you look at short timeframes like a decade or a generation or two it may look like there's not much migration going on. But stretch that a bit, and you'll see the changes. It's like a slow-moving river. Always moving, if you yourself move your viewpoint back a little.
Fair enough, that's not insignificant. As a German, I feel sorry that you feel the UK got flooded with my people, as they are one of the biggest part of the immigrants.
My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.
Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.
The US opened the border significantly during the Biden administration and it caused plenty of issues worth worrying about. I think that is a good example of opening the floodgates. But if you mean only in terms of affecting the population numbers then prob irrelevant.
> plenty of issues worth worrying about
Such as? It looks like the country is doing much worse now that the border is closed.
Foreign countries sending criminals to the U.S.
Diverting hurricane relief to immigrants. Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are hurting Social Security.
Democrats are bringing migrants to the U.S. as voters.
Immigrants from Haiti are eating pets or geese.
There are 30,000 immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and they are here illegally.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/nov/04/donald-trump-...
> Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population
And especially in Japan. It's truly insane how important this is to Japanese people when there's barely any immigrants on their island. Right-wing rhetoric really does a number on your brain.
> There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman.
Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.
The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...
there is no birth rate solution.
but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.
Korea is starting to turn things around! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...
Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
Maybe the fertility rate has to go below zero to bounce back... Japan's rate is like 1.14 yet [1].
Hopefully Korea has figure out something more actionable
[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/77220
What's fertility rate below zero? Women not only have zero babies, they also sometimes kill babies of others?
A rate below 0.99… so less than 1 kid per 2 adults
Looks like that's below 1, but I don't have my glasses on so might be mistaken.
It is, merely saying what he meant
> weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
In the united states the birthrate problem is largely climate change panic (which is not a reason to not have kids because other populations / immigrants start accelerating their birth rates), and then because of heavy migration and other market factors, home prices have skyrocketed. Many couples don't want to have kids until they at least buy their "starter house".
I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
I guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.
Well their economy isn't helping; they export a ton because it is more profitable to export than to sell domestically.
Their work culture actually rivals the US for toxicity.
And they dove into the modern technological society fully before anyone other than maybe Korea... Who is also having birth rate problems
Neither immigrants nor robots will prevent them from becoming essentially extinct as an ethno-national group if they don't do something serious to stimulate the fertility rate. They need to find the root of why Japanese aren't having kids and resolve it.
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
I suspect part of the problem is that people are worked hard and don't really have a vision of the future that they are actively building towards as a nation. Hard work alone doesn't dissuade people from having kids but not having a positive or even constant future target combined with that can cause folks to just give up on that kind of aspiration.
This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.
Make having kids a zero-cost endeavor. If that doesn't do it, make it a profitable one. It's as simple as that.
Children cost hundred's of thousands of dollars to raise, and that doesn't even count the opportunity cost of your own career progression as you have to spend a year of sleepless nights and possibly have one or both parents reduce their work hours to care for the child.
The Japanese government already struggles to pay out pensions with its aging population, healthcare and pension costs are both rising, where do you propose the money for this comes from?
Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
But the real cost of giving birth is not the giving birth, it's the millions of yen you then need to spend over the next 18 years to raise and educate the child, not to mention the cost of possibly dying during childbirth.
> Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Yes
> Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
Yes
> If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
Yes and no. There are a zillion different support programs where you have to fill out a 4 page form in triplicate and submit to city hall to get $80 3 months later. Childbirth is induced regardless of medical necessity because there's one programme that covers medical costs up to the scheduled due date and another programme that covers medical costs after birth, but if you need medical care after your due date with the baby still unborn then you fall through the cracks. The country badly needs to replace its patchwork subsidy program with simply including childbirth under normal medical insurance.
This touches on a core part of this. Don't think about it from a money point of view but form a labor/time point of view.
There is just not enough labor/time for people to have kids and also sustain the elderly that can no longer contribute to the same degree.
No, slash the entitlements, children become the pension. You can’t solve this with taxes because those come from the youth anyway.
It is not as simple as that. In my country giving birth is free. And you get economic support for every child. For most people it's still an economic burden to some extent, but for the majority it's not something which blocks them from having children. It's more that most families I know are content with having two children. It feels fine to them. But that's the families that do have children. 25% of men in my country never have children. It's not enough. A lot of families need to produce 3 children, and better if there are some with four.. and most people simply don't want that. And that's for the most part not a question of economy.
It is as simply as that. Economic support you mentioned is never enough to cover basic needs. Better than nothing, but still require to sacrifice a lot to have an extra kid.
More kids means you need a bigger house, bigger car, extra furniture, a part time job for mother to manage kids.
I specifically mentioned families where the economy is not a burden, and they still don't want many children. Very few will want more than two. Please note that in my country at least, as long as the economy is good enough that there aren't any real problems living, then it doesn't matter if it costs more with more children. That is not the reason.
And there are the increasing infertility rates as well to hamper the efforts.
Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.
> It's as simple as that.
Not really. Cultural values is a huge factor, and that was seriously upended when the US invaded and occupied them.
Necessity is the mother of innovation. I guess they’re pretty optimistic that they can automate away the humans needed to sustain an aging population.
Not a bet I would be willing to take though lol.
I suspect this is why China is going in so hard of humanoid robots over the last few years. They have seen a potential future in Japan and are now trying to avoid this at all costs. It is big long term bet but we will know if it worked in about 20-40 years.
>But a strict zero-immigration policy collides with one terrifying reality: No country in history has successfully reversed a falling fertility rate, and Japan shows zero signs of breaking that trend.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
[1] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-05-27/nationa... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...
The worldometer statistics site doesn't fully agree with that, the Guardian reports that the rate went from 0.75 to 0.80, while worldometer states that the 2026 rate will probably end up at 0.76. At best this has kind of stopped dropping, but it is any case catastrophically low (and way worse than Japan)
I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?
A few of the comments in question have a bad tone - but most of them are reasonable opinions about valuing one's people, culturally or socially, or about the effectiveness of immigration.
I’ve noticed this too. I think it started around the time of the first round of big tech layoffs in the US, and when the US ratcheted up the price for H1B(?) visas.
Seems like economic uncertainty or fear of it breeds xenophobia. Who knew
The article paints immigration as something undoubtedly negative:
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
Not everyone on HN is from SF, sometimes you also get reasonable opinions here.
Unbridled immigration doesn’t work, and that’s become pretty clear.
You need limits, and integration, assimilation would be even better.
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I am not at all concerned about this problem. At this point, society mostly need people as consumers, so quality is not as important as it used to be (in democratic countries it's a bit more complicated because people vote - but this is solvable too).
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
> The industry is shifting from rigid industrial arms to general-purpose robots powered by advanced AI
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
Whatever the answer to people having fewer kids is, it's not "cede your land to some other people who will".
Japan's population around 1900 was mere 43 million people - when most of them were required to work the fields.
Japan will be fine. Europe, on the other hand...
Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.
What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.
Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
If you have a way to secure rice production, please let us know. Or did you mean to abandon rice because it's too labor intensive? There's a reason for subsidies, just as there are reasons for agricultural support in my home country - without it there would be no agriculture. And, without going into details, that would be a disaster.
The quantity of people isn't relevant, it's the quantity of people by age.
Older people, en masse, become a burden. If you add another 43 million people aged over 60 on top of your 43 million from 1900, suddenly that 86 million is less productive than the original 43 million.
Currently Japan has ~41 million people aged 0-40, ~41 million aged 40-60, and ~41 million aged 60+
> cede your land to some other people who will
This is an insane way to frame immigration reform. It isn’t “ceding” anything, it just means being OK that not every single person you know is the same race. Having some cultural exchange, growing as a person, learning about the world beyond your borders… these are virtues.
As an European living in Japan... no, Japan will not be fine. At least we Europeans are aware of our problems and try to look for solutions (whether we actually solve anything is another topic), the Japanese are masters of solving problems by ignoring them.
Their culture has a lot of good things, but also bad things that are leading then to the abyss, but if you watch Japanese media they never discuss any sensitive topic and always try to paint themselves as the best country in the world. Maybe they should start doing some self-criticism...
This will be easy to say up until there isn’t enough money for retired folks.
that's already solved problem, just no country had balls to completely abolish PAYGO (Chile was closest, but they backpedaled a bit) and rely on IRA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_Chile
I completely agree.
as long as 2 people remain it will work out. the mindset can evolve in a crisis.
Everyone keeps talking "more babies. more immigration". what about "less old people" (this is a joke but I am curious if that has ever come up?)
Sometimes I wonder how long it is possible to keep supporting properly senile people. Or those that need constant care. At some point unless there is some massive productivity increase in care it is just not realistic anymore.
"fewer old people" will actually, spoiler alert, happen. Just wait about 20 years. Certain parts of Japan are gonna be completely empty.
Eventually that will be the case but it just takes decades of the demographic bubble to work its way through.
Canada? https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-servi...
Covid-2030 is coming to help.
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They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others.
Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that.
The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war.
The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.
I think you're misunderstanding - "homogeneous" as a cultural description is a spatial metric, not a time metric. Homogeneous cultures indeed change across time, influenced by war and foreign media/languages, just like any culture. The point is not that they do or do not change, the point is that they do so together, largely.
>The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity
This, and race/culture, is what is meant when people say Japan is homogeneous compared to other developed nations.
I think you are confusing "homogeneous" with "indigenous". With the common meaning of "homogeneous" your entire post is a non sequitur. There are many different words ending with "-geneous" meaning entirely different things, you need to look at what goes before the "-genous" part.
>The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway.
This is a very postmodern point view.
I was going to say, Japans history is one that was very... combative. They fought amongst themselves heavily for a long time.
I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.
> Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism?
I'll bite.
In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way.
We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street.
Lot of Americans in this forum, so that's why.
You are forgetting the natives who royally massively got screwed. Perfect example why they should have done everything possible to stop migration.
That analogy doesn't work well. Their situation involved foreign powers enforcing jurisdiction and property claims over their land with a regular standing army; a completely different situation than modern immigration
Yes. Now it’s through a judicial army based on criminalising speech, and instead of based on a country, based on a religion.
Because that’s so much better
I certainly don't understand all you're saying through this tortured analogy, but yes an "army" of judges that issue rulings is much, much better than an army of soldiers that issue killings
And yet american culture and values are from it's dominant and founding group. All other groups were expected to assimilate and join the melting pot.
>>In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today.
I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this. As the locals, certainly didn't want what you imply and were defeated tribe by tribe.
> All other groups were expected to assimilate and join the melting pot.
I partially agree. Counter evidence is that Little Italy, Chinatowns and the like exist and have done for many decades. Ethnic clubs like Sons of Italy persist. Some Pennsylvania Dutch still don't speak English, and still set themselves apart. But at the same time, many from those groups join the majority culture and leave their old languages behind.
In this respect I don't see modern immigration in America any differently. Newer immigrant groups have their culture enclaves, but many from those groups also enter and adopt the majority culture.
> I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this
You're misreading my comment. For most of us, the locals at time of ancestor arrival had already displaced the natives to whom you refer
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> the deep psychological truths about human tribalism
… that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one.
This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.
Yep, there is a lot of evidence that says even nomadic tribes heavily intermingled with others because it was seen as a means of building resilience for all.
There is a lot of evidence that didn’t happen all at once and funded by social programs that effectively discourage integration.
How was it disproven by the New World? The countries that mixed (Latin America) are weaker than the country that didn't (USA)
The USA is pretty dang diverse, and definitely mixed. That mixing is a core part of it’s culture and history, actually. And now, the country that mixed (USA) is stronger than the Old World that didn’t (Europe).
Which is to say: There is no inherent psychological tribalism that makes having a diverse country impossible or ruinous; rather, this tribalism is manufactured and spread by hatemongers. The New World is a very good case study, here.
It's culture and values come from the dominant group. It didn't really mix equally between groups. If the dominant groups will shrink and another arises the values and the culture will change.
>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
So then it's ok to uproot the flower and replace it with another one, because "it was going to change anyway"? Analogies are a distraction.
You refer to a period where we had constant war in Europe?
You literally posted an example of the opposite.
In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known. If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
Right, and this latest influx certainly outpaces anything in many generations.
Doesn't sound fun though.First being conquered by Romans, then Anglo Saxons, then pillaged by Vikings and the conquered again by Normans.
I'm pretty sure where ever you come from that you have a dominant groups which imposes it's culture to every other subgroup. Every country where that is not the case, you infighting and war.
You are leaving out quite a bit of warfare, exploitation, rape, hatred, cultural erasure, colonization, slavers, serfdom, monarchy, religious conversion, religion erasure, and genocide in that pretty picture you paint as "All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere".
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
If you become poor enough and weak enough, you'll be "replaced" anyway. And not on your own terms.
It is not necessarily true, I think it is opposite. More poorer they get, less attractive that place becomes. Especially since Japan is not rich with natural resources, there is nothing really to steal there
They become less attractive to immigrants looking to engage in economic arbitrage.
They become more attractive to outside non-governmental powers looking to engage in economic arbitrage, which brings its own challenges.
They have less negotiating power with wealthier countries which impacts their sovereignty.
Poor countries also tend to have more internal conflict: https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/
If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs.
There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal.
There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless.
When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later.
Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long.
> truths about human tribalism?
Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.
It isn't just about getting it above 2.0, it is having those people in the work force. Even if you could magic up enough babies today, it would be about 20 years until they would be actively offsetting the issue. The is why demographic issues are so insidious. The problems that keep birth rates down today, end up amplifying these issues in the future further suppressing them. Eventually you hit equilibrium but it is a long way down until you get there.
> They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.
Because it takes 18 years to create an adult and nothing other than immigration is working at the moment.
If any country was truly serious about this problem, they would end social programs for the elderly and focus that funding for families.
This is one of those thing, yes that is a true statement but what do you do with that information? Would you be willing to make that call?
Looks like the trolley problem in action.
Yes, because otherwise your economy and country collapse sooner or later. ie everyone dies. Why do think homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea are finally opening up the immigration floodgates? Because there’s currently no other choice. The other options (directly lowering the costs of child care, lowering work hours, robots, et al) still haven’t worked. Immigration buys you time.
If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
> If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
One big downside of any kind of social programs is that it conditions the population to rely solely on the state, thinking that their payments into the system will guarantee them safety. We tend to forget for a state to exist and to provide services, it needs people. Those people need to be born, raised and cultured in order to act as a community.
Not everyone views outsiders with unease, it's actually possible to nurture curiosity over fear.
I think the point is we can't have our cake and eat it too.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
> They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point.
> And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
Also different cultures can withstand different level of hardships. With population decline what kind of quality of life drop we are talking about? Even if people get 2 times poorer, it is still way above than whatever people had in old times. That level can easily drop way further and people can adapt.
I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.
Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted. Work hard on making elderly care as easy as possible, automate automatable things. Importing people is just kicking the ageing population can down the road; these immigrant will grow old one day, and then what, import even more people?
People from other cultures tend to have more babies.
For one generation, maybe. Once they've assimilated even a little (which is usually what you want, right?) they revert to the same birthrate as everyone else.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for.
More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works.
Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
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I completely agree, very well said.
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Man this thread is like catnip for racists.
They just can’t help themselves
Xenophobes, not racists. There is no race called 'muslim'. That this thread attracts comments from those who have migration-related problems high on their agenda is not that strange since it is dealing with the problems of the (absence of) migration. This subject has been polarised - not in the least by people calling anyone who does not agree a 'racist' - so some of the comments are extreme as well, viz. the grandparent comment about muslims and Indians.
Drop the knee-jerk 'muslims and indians are !"!"#%#¤', drop the 'racist! racist! racist!' and maybe, just maybe we can discuss the subject in a more productive manner. It does need discussing because neither 'close all the borders for anyone who does not look, speak, think or believe like me' nor 'open all the borders and welcome anyone who comes in' is a viable solution. Countries which do the former end up in the backwaters of history, those which do the latter end up as a footnote.
Lol. "xenophobes not racists" gives the same energy as "it isn't pedophilia, it's ephebophilia."
Go jerk off to a Roman statue or something.
I thought this site catered to those a bit more discerning when it comes to discussing complex subjects but I seem to be mistaken. You do know the English language offers more than the few words you employ to have nuanced discussions?
Quite a fitting name you chose for yourself by the way.
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> crime rate hikes.
No, not really. Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates. In case-study after case-study, it’s shown immigration has little to no impact on crime-rates. This was even disproven after the height of the Syrian refuge crisis! But media likes sensationalist reporting, so public perception doesn’t match the statistics.
> cultural demise.
Meaningless, also created by the media. If you listen to the media, Britain is under the fierce grip of Sharia law, enforced by… the 6% of the population that is Muslim. Yes, yes, how scary. I guess English culture was pretty weak, to meet its demise from such a meager blip.
>Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates.
This just isn't true. There are a lot of studies that purport this. There are also a lot of studies that purport the opposite. A quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime shows a bit of the field here.
The details get really important when talking about this. Details like:
- immigrant crime rates are often compared to non-immigrant rates, as if the native-born are a single bloc, rather than distinct segments
- "immigrants" treated as a single bloc
- immigrant crime getting controlled for by age, gender, income, and education --- which is cold comfort if the bulk of your immigration is poor uneducated young men
- first-gen immigrants, if immigrating to work, often have lower crime rates. This effect disappears with second-generation. But when they do crime, it is counted as native crime, rather than immigrant crime. That...doesn't quite cleave reality at the joints.
- labor law violations, tax evasion, etc., often not counted as "crime."
Don’t pretend the people you are replying to care about actual facts. It’s all feelings and xenophobia (or worse) for them
For what it worth, your comment have just feeling and xenophobia. No facts whatsoever.
Immigration HAS an effect: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-crime-figures-migrants-refugee...
The thing is very simple: I am really not afraid of police in Germany. Worst thing that can happen is spending a night in jail. In other countries the police can shoot you or seriously beat you up. So basically there is no police. And the jail… well it’s all inclusive hotel compared to other countries. Deportation is anyway very unlikely. So what should stop me from doing bad things?
For one, this article doesn’t claim that immigration increases overall crime.
Secondly, the article hints at a sampling bias we have run into before, during the Syrian refugee crisis: Immigrants are not more likely compared to their peers.
If you compare a block that is predominately young men to the general population, they commit more crime – because they are young men, not because they are immigrants.
A proper statistical comparison looks at the sub-demographics, comparing immigrant and native folk to their peers in age and sex.
Compare 18-year old men from Algeria to native 18 year-old men, and they aren’t any more likely to commit crime. But between 18-year old men and the general population? Well, duh, because one group has more young men in it.
Which is to say: No, immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes.
First generation immigrants to the EU do not have higher rates of crime vs. natively born citizens. (Go ahead, google it). This is a far right talking point, but it simply not true.*
* https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/20635-eu-research-dispro...
I am not going to debate on manipulation of one cherry picked number.
If your point is that crime hasn't risen up since EU started to receive "refugees" in droves, you are either not living in EU or prefer to ignore wider evidence dismissing it as "far-right talking point" (whatever that is)
Crime-rates going up + Immigrants being no more likely to commit crimes = There is no causality
Which crime, in which country, over what time period, and what evidence shows refugees were the cause rather than one of many contributing factors?
Actual study from actual scientists: https://www.ifo.de/en/press-release/2025-02-18/more-foreigne...
>“The results are consistent with international research, according to which migration and refugee inflows have no systematic influence on crime in the host country.”
That's an opinion piece from a NGO...
> Foreigners are overrepresented in the crime statistics compared to their share of the population. This is due to factors independent of origin
It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah to admit that migrants are commiting more crime per-capita, and then build a statistical model to try to claim that actually more migrants doesn't cause an increase in crime.
I live in Germany and crime has been falling significantly since the 1990s with clearance rates for crimes like murder at 93%+
It’s by far one of the safest countries in the world.
I think the way you phrase you reply makes it pretty clear where you stand emotionally and politically, so I won’t pretend that facts will change your mind, but alas.
So tired of hearing the same lies repeated over and over again in media.
> It’s by far one of the safest countries in the world.
It seriously puzzles me how one can carry the ridiculous thought. The only thing to advise here is perhaps to travel more - to countries like Singapore, Japan, Korea, Thailand and many other places where homelessness, rape, "refugee" with a knife on a street are not a part of everyday's life.
Germany was the safe country. When Germans lived there.
> I think the way you phrase you reply makes it pretty clear where you stand emotionally and politically, so I won’t pretend that facts will change your mind, but alas.
Instead of making emotional statements, would be great if you can actually bring facts you talking much of, but instead talking about your emotions. I would be extremely interested in "facts" explaining how importing criminals and uneducated 3rd world "refugees" actually made Germany (and rest of EU) safer.
And if you actually believe Berlin now is safer compared to Berlin in 90s, you can't be intellectually honest.
When I studied in Germany, my house was broken into by a Bosnian migrant neighbour. The entire thing was captured on CCTV and reported to the Polizei, and they did exactly nothing, claiming the CCTV footage “does not prove anything”. All my money in my wallet was taken.
Yeah since then I don’t trust the crime figures from Germany.
It's well known fact how Germany massages statistics to avoid any reference to "refugee" crime. Likely no other country in EU does so much shenanigans to hide the statistics
Is it just me or all three choices all the same outcomes? It's like the ending to Mass Effect 3.
It's possible, but at this point we don't know yet how each will play out long term. EU chose to destroy itself fast, while Japan chose slow economic demise.
Only time will tell how each will play out.
The only thing destroying the EU is the ruse if the far right.
Surely the tech culture on HN would prefer the "move fast and break things" approach? Faster and tighter loops right?
I am not sure tech approach is a right way to go if we project it at wider scale on a society or a country.
Society moves at way slower pace, and wrong turns may takes decades to rectify. Needless to say wrong turns may have horrible ramifications lasting decades as well.
If you'd ask me, I would certainly be against tech approach here. Lets leave it where it does play well.
It's perfectly natural for a country to experience periods of growth and decline. Demographic and economic cycles rise and fall over time, and a period of contraction does not mean growth won't return in the future.
What isn't reversible is losing a country's identity. As a foreigner, I'd rather see Japan remain Japan than become a messy cultural mix, like Europe.