Thank a Local Immigrant for Your Public Services

by Benjamin Studebaker

Regular readers may recall that I wrote about Japan’s poor birth rate earlier in the week. I engaged in a conversation with a friend of mine about the subject (here’s his view on Japan) during which I observed that Germany’s birth rate is actually slightly worse than Japan’s, yet there’s we’re all writing about Japanese birth rates rather than the German ones. I wondered why that is, and he pointed to the immigration figures–Germany gets many more move-ins than Japan does, so the birth rate crisis in Germany has not translated into a population crisis on the same scale. This has made me want to investigate to what extent the EU and US have mitigated the effects of a birth rate slowdown with immigrants, so that’s what I’m on about today.

Germany has the lowest birth rate in the developed world, so I’ll make extensive use of it as an example. Here’s the German birth rate:

Here’s Japan’s:

As we can see, both rates are hovering between 8 and 9 births per 1,000 people per year. Immigration is a whole different story–via The World Factbook, Japan  breaks even on immigrants while Germany receives 0.89 immigrants per 1,000 people per year. This makes a significant difference to population projections.

The Japanese government projects the population to fall by 30% by 2050:

The German government only foresees a 10-17% fall:


So despite a worse German birth rate, Japan’s forthcoming population problem is twice as bad, and the Germans have only their immigrants to thank. But are the German people appreciative of their immigrant population? Not in the slightest–a global survey on attitudes toward immigrants finds some interesting results:

  •  54% of Germans believe immigration has had a very or fairly negative impact on Germany, while only 16% registered a corresponding positive view.
  • 53% of Germans agree that there are too many immigrants in Germany. Only 20% disagree.
  • 58% of Germans believe immigrants have placed too much stress on public services. Only 18% disagree.
  • 37% of Germans think that immigrants have made it harder for people to find jobs in Germany, with 34% disagreeing.
  • 23% of Germans agree that immigration is good for the German economy, with 44% disagreeing.

What’s so very stunning about all of this is that German immigrants are unquestionably propping up the German population and consequently Germany’s tax base and economic growth. German immigrants are not placing strain on public services, they are keeping public services running. The fact that nearly twice as many Germans think immigration is bad for the economy as think it good shows that the average German citizen has no meaningful comprehension of the role immigration plays in Germany.

What’s more, Germany is not unique in its inability to appreciate what immigrants bring to our societies–the numbers for the United States are similar, and in some cases worse. This despite the fact that, if not for immigrants and minorities, the United States would also be experiencing the beginning of a shrinking population, as per The Economist:

Thankfully, the United States enjoys a comfortable 3.64 immigrants per 1,000 people per year, and those immigrants (who are mostly Asian or Hispanic) tend to have lots of babies when they get here. Indeed, thanks to immigrants and their ravenous sexual appetites, the US is projected to make significant gains in working age population over its main economic rivals:

Thanks to their one-child policy, even the Chinese are headed down the demographic dead end. Provided America gets its political and economic institutions in order (and doesn’t allow China to become a developed country), its immigration advantage should allow it to remain the most powerful state, both economically and militarily. If Germans have immigrants to thank for making their population problems only half as bad as Japan’s, the United States has immigrants to thank for its next century of potential dominance.

Nonetheless, citizens on both sides of the Atlantic continue to support politicians and political parties that promise to reduce immigration figures. This mentality is a self-destructive pathology. It is grounded not in any reasoned understanding of the role immigrants play in our economies and in funding our entitlement programs. It is entirely a function of xenophobia, of a failure to adjust to, understand, or appreciate a pluralism of ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds.

The CBO even found that the additional immigration that would be spurred by immigration reform would shrink the deficit by $197 billion–fiscal conservatives should be planting big wet kisses on the lips of their Asian and Hispanic brethren, not planning to erect large walls manned by drones.

I’ll close with a brief reply to the inevitable Malthusian or steady state theorist in the audience who believes my whole argument wrong from first principle because he thinks that a larger population is a bad thing, that Japan really has the best society. These arguments invariably rely on the claim that we have a finite biosphere and/or that we have obligations to the planet’s ecology such that larger populations only mean that more people will compete over the same quantity of scarce resources and/or that the planet will be polluted at an increased pace. These individuals are tragically mistaken for reasons I discussed in detail here and here. To put it very briefly for those of you uninterested in padding my blog statistics:

  • Developed countries are spectacularly efficient at farming and produce large food surpluses, so much so that the amount of land used for farming has begun to decrease. If poor countries farmed in the same way do or were wealthier and more able to purchase food from developed states, they would have no food problems.
  • If we want to make efficient use of renewable energy (solar/wind/geothermal/fusion/etc.), reduce land use (vertical farming/high-rise buildings), and consequently reduce our environmental impact, we need technology, and that means we need economic growth, and it takes people to grow the economy–Japan’s economic growth has been held down for some time by its falling population.
  • In the long-run, if we want to avoid extinction, we need to colonize other worlds, and that will require quite a bit of economic growth.

There are some who are morally unconcerned about other human beings, or even actively despise them, and who consequently are not moved by any of the broadly humanist arguments I advance above. These positions are nihilist and misanthropic and should be rejected on that basis. However, another form of argument has been advanced by David Benatar, who argues against population growth on the belief that human lives are bad for human beings themselves. This is commendably neither nihilist nor misanthropic, but it’s also wrong, as I argued over here.