By Will Martin (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: June 3, 2015
With decreasing birth rates, it’s time that we stop worrying so much about overpopulation, and start thinking about what we will do when we no longer have enough people to keep the country running.
Canada has historically had a strong birth rate, but has levelled out and is now just behind China at 1.61 births per woman, according to the World Bank. It’s no secret that there will be issues supporting social security in the coming years — higher birth rates in the past means more people of retirement age than taxpayers in the present. It’s inevitable, and already becoming a problem in Germany and Japan.
Germany just recently passed Japan with the world’s lowest birth rate, and is supplementing its population growth by massive immigration, which is causing problems with large numbers of unemployed migrants having to rely on social welfare. According to BBC’s Berlin correspondent Jenny Hill, in 2013 “the mayors of 16 large German cities wrote to the government asking for help with unemployed migrants flooding into their regions from Eastern Europe.”
Japan has its own issues with immigration — foreigners have trouble integrating with society and many leave due to alienation. BBC News’ Chris Hogg reports that Doudou Dienne, an independent investigator of racism and xenophobia for the UN, is “concerned that politicians used racist or nationalist themes to whip up popular emotions” in Japan. Japanese government advisor Ayako Sono even suggested this year that an apartheid-like system be put in place.
“Since I learned the situation in South Africa 20 to 30 years ago, I’ve come to believe whites, Asians, and blacks should live separately,” she writes. It is difficult for an immigrant to live in such a climate.
Increased immigration then comes with its own potential problems, and is therefore not necessarily the simple solution to the problem of underpopulation. Is there another way? Just as China developed the one-child policy to curtail overpopulation, there might be a case for a two- or three-child policy to increase population. Obviously, you can’t force people to reproduce, but you can reduce the burden on people having multiple children by incentivizing multi-child households and mandating more maternity leave. It’s important that this problem is addressed, or soon Canada too could be finding out exactly what it’s like when there are too many people retiring and not enough people paying the bill.
