The Global Baby Bust

Phillip Longman

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004

Summary:  Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it's too late.

Phillip Longman is Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming The Empty Cradle (Basic Books, 2004), from which this article is adapted.

If high-tech isn't the answer, what about immigration? It turns out that importing new, younger workers is at best only a partial solution. To be sure, the United States and other developed nations derive many benefits from their imported human capital. Immigration, however, does less than one might think to ease the challenges of population aging. One reason is that most immigrants arrive not as babies but with a third or so of their lives already behind them -- and then go on to become elderly themselves. In the short term, therefore, immigrants can help to increase the ratio of workers to retirees, but in the long term, they add much less youth to the population than would newborn children.

Indeed, according to a study by the UN Population Division, if the United States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time, it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, however, the U.S. population would total 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendants.

Just housing such a massive influx would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months. And even if the homes could be built, it is unclear how long the United States and other developed nations can sustain even current rates of immigration. One reason, of course, is heightened security concerns. Another is the prospect of a cultural backlash against immigrants, the chances of which increase as native birthrates decline. In the 1920s, when widespread apprehension about declining native fertility found voice in books such as Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy," the U.S. political system responded by shutting off immigration. Germany, Sweden, and France did the same in the 1970s as the reality of population decline among their native born started to set in.

Another constraint on immigration to the United States involves supply. Birthrates, having already fallen well below replacement levels in Europe and Asia, are now plummeting throughout Latin America as well, which suggests that the United States' last major source of imported labor will dry up. This could occur long before Latin nations actually stop growing -- as the example of Puerto Rico shows. When most Americans think of Puerto Rico, they think of a sunny, over-crowded island that sends millions of immigrants to the West Side of New York City or to Florida. Yet with a fertility rate well below replacement level and a median age of 31.8 years, Puerto Rico no longer provides a net flow of immigrants to the mainland, despite an open border and a lower standard of living. Evidently, Puerto Rico now produces enough jobs to keep up with its slowing rate of population growth, and the allure of the mainland has thus largely vanished.

For its part, sub-Saharan Africa still produces many potential immigrants to the United States, as do the Middle East and parts of South Asia. But to attract immigrants from these regions, the United States will have to compete with Europe, which is closer geographically and currently has a more acute need for imported labor. Europe also offers higher wages for unskilled work, more generous social benefits, and large, already established populations of immigrants from these areas.

Even if the United States could compete with Europe for immigrants, it is by no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the rest of the world, and war and disease have made mortality rates there extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve. Although the course of the AIDS epidemic through sub-Saharan Africa remains uncertain, the CIA projects that AIDS and related diseases could kill as many as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.

A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM

Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the "fittest," or most successful, individuals are those who have few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.

So where will the children of the future come from? The answer may be from people who are at odds with the modern environment -- either those who don't understand the new rules of the game, which make large families an economic and social liability, or those who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether.