this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
35 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
55020 readers
288 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m not anti-immigration. Immigration is not the fix for how the world will deal with declining birth rates world wide, leading to a large gap between the number of available laborers and the number of laborers needed to keep things running smoothly.
Immigration only works if one country has more people than jobs while another country has more jobs than people.
What we’re headed into right now is more jobs than people by a LOT.
Also, Japan is a country that hit this problem early on (they culturally don’t have much immigration) and found that it’s also possible to export your dumb jobs to other countries that also buy the things they are making, keeping only the ones they are really good at in-country while scraping all the revenue from their exported labor. This only works because other countries were a little slower to run into this birth rate issue.
Most of these problems fall back to WW2 and the massive amount of babies that were born afterwards.
It's only really the hyper developed countries that are experiencing the massive drop off in birth rates, so immigration would actually help this problem significantly.
Also, the lack of immigration in Japan is as much a matter of policy as it is everywhere else. Their government heavily discourages migrant labour (due in part to cultural racism), which has made their plummeting birth rate much more of a problem than it needs to be.
It’s not going to be enough.
Birth rates aren’t going to magically turn around, immigration isn’t going to magically fix it.
Ultimately, so what? What is the problem you are attempting to prevent? Declining population is not per se a problem.
At scale, global instability leading to supply chain breakdown, leading to disruption of things we don’t think could be scarce like CPUs, medical equipment, defensive weaponry.
But also, a surfeit of resources and wealth. We've seen global population crashes before and (aside from the mass death that predicated them) I understand that the aftermath was actually quite pleasant.
If our system can't support even a steady state population, it needs to fail. Constant growth is a ponzi scheme.
As population numbers fall, we won’t have people that can extract those resources.
We won’t have people to defend global trade routes. We’re seeing this already. The mighty US navy can’t prevent Iran from using cheap drones to choke the world of oil. Oil is used to make everything, and already there’s barely enough to go around.
Countries will enter unrest and devolve.
The next 25 years are going to be really bad.
25 years isn't that long. If that's all it takes to transition to a static model, I take that deal any day of the week. The longer we predicate everything on growth, the worse transition gets.