191
South Korean official expelled for suggesting ‘importing women’ to boost birth rate
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
191 points (99.5% liked)
World News
55284 readers
2105 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.