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South Korean official expelled for suggesting ‘importing women’ to boost birth rate
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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SKorea, just like Japan doesn't have a birth rate problem, they have a racism problem. Their ethnostate immigration policies make Donald Trump look like Angela Merkel.
Nope. I mean, they do have a racism problem; but the birthrate "problem" is economic, and the US is going the same way. When 75% of the population can't afford to raise children, they're going to try and not have children. Let alone the like 2.1 per couple average to keep things increasing.
I mean I have a few reasons for never wanting to have kids, but yeah the economy is a big one.
Every developed country goes the same way. Some, like the US, are able to attract enough immigration to compensate.
Pretty sure rome didn't survive for a couple thousand years on immigrants. Neither has England. If your idea of a fix is importing a constant supply of people (most immigrants going to any country don't tend to show up wealthy either, I might add) to keep up the status quo, you're running on a broken system.
You mistake me completely. I’m not advertising the virtues of this system at all. I’m just pointing out that there is nothing Korean or American about declining birth rates. This is a universal phenomenon of a society’s transition from agrarianism where more hands = more wealth to an educated, skilled labor force where each child requires a significant investment.
The US and, for example, Germany use immigration to offset this and keep their population growing. That’s simply a fact you can look up. Japan for example doesn’t want to do this and they’re dealing with the consequences of population decline. This is all over the news for years now.
I’m not saying this is good or bad or anything. This is just the way things are.
Your bit about Ancient Rome is a good laugh because it was hardly a developed society by today’s standards and it did indeed run on imported labor, except they called them slaves. So you are at once off base and also wrong.
That's not the issue. Wealth became too consolidated. America's baby boomers weren't born for efficiency of labor hands. They were born because one person could work one full time job at most employers and afford a house, a car, bills, a few kids, and a vacation every year.
Now that's not possible for very much of the workforce at all. Raising kids hasn't gotten that much more expensive to raise in relation to other basic needs. It's just that all those other basic needs tend to take up a lot bigger portion of your paycheck. People already struggling don't want to add children to the pile of their struggles.
In contrast to expecting population to grow ad infinitum?
If you build your economic system as a pyramid scheme, you are building in failure.
and upside down pyramid.
HCOL, low job prospect even with certain degrees is a red flag, but governments continue to ignore that aspect, they want cannon fodder for the military and low wage jobs instead.
Idk about them there, but I know here in the US they tend to be rather aloof. If they are in a higher social strata than you, and you are a worker at a place they are a patron, they won't acknowledge you. You give them the nod passing them and they ignore you, where even our own wealthy assholes will acknoweldge you here generally.
I learned that's just a cultural difference, not something to take personally, but that their culture has a lot of that kind of attitudes.
100%. Imo their racism problem is a subset of their 'caste' problem.
Their birthrate problem however, has very littler overlap with it, and is primarily driven by how their society is geared towards economic productivity 'at all cost'.
SK is worst off than japan although not by much.