monograph · The End of Childhood?
Quo vadis, infertile and multicultural Europe?
Alejandro Macarron Larumbe
Telecommunications engineer, business strategy consultant and demographic analyst. He is the author of the books “El suicidio demográfico de España” and “Suicidio demográfico en Occidente y medio mundo”, among others. He was founder and director of the Demographic Renaissance Foundation.
Augusto Comte said that the destiny of a society lies in its demography. The destiny of a nation in which fewer children are born each year is that its native population will age for lack of young blood, first, and then tend to disappear. That of a village where only a few elderly people remain is to be deserted of human life. That of a France which is filling up for decades with a Maghreb-Muslim population (a la) which is poorly integrated into the “République”, is to suffer a growing social fracture, as evidenced by the dramatic events of July 2023, with a horrifying balance: several deaths; more than 700 policemen wounded; more than 3,500 arrested; 12,000 vehicles burned; 2,500 buildings attacked or burned, including many dozens of police stations and schools; etc.
A Europe whose fertility rate does not reach 2.1 children per woman – the replacement threshold for generational replacement[1] threshold for generational replacement, i.e., that in about 30 years there will be approximately the same number of women aged 15 to 44 years as at present – in no country, and in all by a wide and/or growing margin, is doomed to an increasingly aging native population, whose numbers are increasingly decreasing, as deaths exceed births by an ever-increasing margin. This dynamic is called “demographic winter”, by analogy with the cold and lifeless season / with much less apparent life in nature, or “demographic suicide”, as society tends to age and die out little by little for lack of generational replacement. The following two graphs give an idea of how both phenomena are progressing: the reduction of Europe’s indigenous population and its increasing aging.
[1]: The replacement threshold was traditionally much higher, because infant and child mortality were very high by today’s standards. In Spain, around 1880 -and something similar occurred in other European countries at that time or only a few decades earlier, as well as in the rest of the world-, half of the children died before their twelfth birthday. Without a minimum of 4.5 to 5 children per woman, societies with such high infant mortality rates would have declined rapidly.
In some countries, the cumulative effect of negative natural balances is already very large. In Germany, since 1972, there have been 6.5 million more deaths than births. In Italy, since 1993, the decline is about 2.5 million. In Spain, in the last 10 years, deaths of native Spaniards have exceeded by 1.2 million more than births to mothers born in Spain.
Nowadays and increasingly, by demography, the “Old Continent” is a “Continent of old people”. The increase over the last 40 years in the median age of the population – that which divides it into two halves with an equal number of people – and in its average age, is unparalleled in the history of Europe, and is expected to continue to grow. It is important to note that the bulk of demographic aging to date, and almost all of its negative effects, are not due to the increase in life expectancy, but to the fall in the birth rate. Thus, in Spain, around 75% of the growth in the average age of the population since 1976 is due to the decrease in the number of children per woman. And the other 25%, to a large extent, is innocuous, because in the last half century the average age of entry into old age has been delayed and its subsequent progression slowed down, so that now very few people aged 65 are “old”, unlike traditionally, which is why the retirement age was set at 65 about a century ago. A young Paul McCartney imagined himself as an “old man” in his delightful 1967 song “When I’m Sixty Four”. Now he’s 81, and not an old man.
What consequences can be expected from these demographic dynamics? With a point of humility, before giving a conclusive answer, it is necessary to point out that we are in a demographic terra incognita, because life expectancy has never been so high, nor have there been such persistently low fertility rates in large masses of population (and if they occurred at some time and place, the corresponding society had to reduce its population in an accelerated manner, since mortality rates at any age have historically been much higher than now, and much more so among children and young people). Therefore, we lack empirical data to conclusively corroborate the following. However, based on common sense, and on what is being observed in countries such as Japan, in what we now call “empty Spain”, which are already very old, and in the West in general, the following positive and negative effects can be expected, as shown in the following two tables.
There are no coins without two sides, certainly, but the foreseeable positive effects would not compensate by far the negative ones. On the economic level, it is true that maintaining the elderly is more expensive and generally less pleasant than raising children and young people, for whom, moreover, the money spent is an “investment”, not a “consumptive expense”. In the affective sphere, there is no possible compensation for the growing domestic-family loneliness, the scourge of the 21st century in developed countries, which is the result of two phenomena that feed on each other: the low birth rate and the growing family disintegration. In the last 50 years, the percentage of Spaniards living alone has increased sixfold, and something similar is happening throughout the West. As for the electoral gerontocracy, that is, the growing electoral power of retirees, just look at what happened in the Great Recession in Spain. Between 2007 and 2014, GDP contracted by 4% (and it would have done so much more without the colossal increase experienced by public debt, a whopping 650 billion euros), and many millions of Spaniards suffered somewhat or a lot from the claws of the crisis, but spending on retirement pensions grew by around 50%, at the cost of suffocating public deficits, with a very negative effect on interest rates that companies and individuals had to bear in the worst years of risk bonuses. And on the geopolitical level, if the population of Europe – including Russia – reached around 25% of humanity around 1900, in the Belle Époque, it now represents 9% and is decreasing even further, and its world weight in almost all fields is clearly declining.
In general, the positive collateral effects of the process of demographic suicide are similar to what death entails in terms of putting an end to all kinds of problems and suffering: in the cemeteries there is neither unemployment, nor poverty, nor delinquency, nor wars, nor public deficit, nor corruption, nor machismo, nor the opposite! (for the same reason, not a few people end their lives by committing suicide, to free themselves from suffering).
In parallel to the decline of the autochthonous population, the population of non-European origin is constantly growing in Europe, partly to cover the decrease in the number of people that – with a few decades of delay – brings with it the reduction of births, partly due to Welfare States that attract and retain much more immigration than the labor market requires, partly due to a general failure to comply with the laws on foreigners and border control, partly due to the higher fertility rate of immigrants, especially Africans and/or Muslims. And the big question is: can Europe’s demographic suicide due to lack of children be compensated by immigrants? Only partially, insufficiently, and with considerable risks.
Economically, immigration can bring low and low-middle skilled labor to Europe, since there are a huge number of low-skilled people in the world today who would migrate to the West, and that is valuable. But it cannot provide enough high and medium-high skilled labor (there is much less world supply of such labor), for the jobs that produce more wealth and tax revenues, increasingly important in modern technological societies.
At the family-private level, immigration does not help against the emotional desertification that the lack of children produces. No one can “import” an immigrant so that they can give him affection in old age as if he were his son, if he did not have them when he was young. Or if you only have one child, you cannot bring “siblings” from abroad (in fact, there are hardly any international adoptions anymore).
Nor does immigration stop social aging and the problems it entails, it only reduces its rate of progression somewhat. From 1996 to 2023, 7.4 million net new immigrants came to Spain, who have had about two million children here. Without this immigration, the average age of the population would have increased by about eight years. With it (more than 9 million people with foreign roots, almost all middle-aged, young people and children) it has done “only” six, which is still a lot.
As for the risks of immigration, the following are worth mentioning:
- That too many come, attracted by a generous welfare state and lax border control, which entails a heavy burden on the public purse in public benefits and services, more unemployment, wage erosion in less skilled jobs due to greater labor competition, tensions in the housing market, more congestion in public services such as healthcare, etc. This is the case in Spain, where, despite very high unemployment rates, immigration continues to arrive in mass (almost 700,000 more net immigrants in 2022, according to the INE).
- Deficient socio-cultural integration, with its consequences of more delinquency, jihadism and social fractures. As an example: the case of France.
- Believing that with immigration there is no longer a need for more children of our own, with a mentality typical of the worst “classist lordship” of the cliché: “we renounce having children. Let others have them for us in poorer countries”. What if people stop coming from abroad because we are stagnant and decrepit countries, and in their countries of origin they tend to live better?
Thus, Europe needs to increase its birth rate, failing which the serious consequences discussed in this article will be that the answer to the “Quo vadis” will be: “it is heading for collapse/disaster”. And yet, as inexplicably as it is regrettable, the very serious European birth deficit was not one of the major issues proposed by the EU at the recent conference on the future of Europe, nor was a sufficient birth rate among the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), despite being a major threat to the medium- and long-term social and economic sustainability of Europe and a large number of countries in other parts of the world, in which, between them all, a large majority of humanity lives.¿Cómo lograr que aumente la natalidad en Europa, hasta recuperar al menos el nivel de fecundidad de reemplazo (2,1 hijos por mujer, de media)? No es algo trivial de lograr, en absoluto, pero si es vital que lo consigamos. Por nuestra parte, para concluir este artículo, sintetizamos en el siguiente cuadro lo que creemos que se debería hacer.
