Op-ed: More Immigration Won’t Lead to a Higher Birthrate

Real estate agents often say, “It’s always a good time to buy a house”—because they earn their commission whether or not it’s actually a good time to buy a house.

In the same vein, over at the Wall Street Journal it’s always a good time to increase immigration. The paper’s editorial page—notorious for repeatedly advocating a constitutional amendment saying, “There shall be open borders”—recently ran a column by Jason Riley, a member of the editorial board, entitled “Want to Raise Birthrates? Immigration Is the Key.”

Curiously for a newspaper focused on business and economics, the column contains no numbers to back up this assertion.

Now, falling birthrates are an issue for almost all countries, developed or otherwise. The way this is usually expressed is the total fertility rate, or TFR. This represents the number of children the statistically average woman is likely to have in her lifetime. To maintain a stable population, a nation needs a TFR of slightly above two—one for mom, one for dad, and an additional fraction to account for child mortality.

Every nation except Israel in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has below-replacement TFR, and fertility has been dropping almost everywhere. Even countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Iran, and Turkey have below-replacement fertility, and many other developing countries will soon join them.

A TFR below 2.1 will eventually lead to a declining population. In itself, a smaller population doesn’t have to be a problem, since countries had fewer people in the past and got along fine. The real problem comes from the increasing share of the elderly, leading to fears of national senescence. In South Korea, perhaps the most extreme example of a birth dearth, those aged 65 and over are projected to climb from about 20% of the total population today to nearly half in 50 years.

It is in this context that the Journal published its number-free column on immigration as a way to boost fertility. Luckily, colleagues of mine at the Center for Immigration Studies crunched the numbers—and it turns out immigration does little, if anything, to increase the overall fertility rate, at least in the United States.

. . .

[Read the whole thing at the American Mind.]