[eska]

There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman. Controlled immigration is different from opening the floodgates.

Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.

[Tor3]

Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions. Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).

If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.

(The worldometer site makes it easy to look up and compare various countries: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...)

[HerbManic]

The unfortunate flip side of this is that when you bring in a lot of immigrants, it can keep a lot of markets pumped up far beyond what the markets would usually dictate.

Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.

The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.

I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.

It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.

I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.

[pjjpo]

> A crumbling pension system

AFAIK the pension system is quite well invested and can continue for many decades even with current trends. Where do you get that it is crumbling? There is a silly law forcing recalculation of pension payments vs inflation to happen too infrequently causing issues right now but that is probably a different issue.

[bulbar]

The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.

[doctorwho42]

What solutions though?

From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.

Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.

The community support and available activities.

Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.

[yaris]

From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level. Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.

[bulbar]

> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.

Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any. Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).

I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.

[bulbar]

> extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.

Always a bad idea to compare with the US which is known to have a terrible social net.

> The community support and available activities.

Interesting. Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children? That seems to be a huge pain point in Germany. Also child support is too low.

I agree that solutions might not be so simple that you can just "buy them". What you can buy at least is removing pain points and giving incentives.

[kalleboo]

> Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children?

Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.

[handle584]

Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.

Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.

[Tor3]

I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".

[bulbar]

I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.

Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.

It will only becomes worse over time, though.

[Tor3]

What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.

So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?

[lovich]

> There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman.

Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.

The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...

[Retric]

> no country has reversed its birth rate problem.

America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.

So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.

[Gud]

So it hasn’t?

[kibwen]

US fertility rates first fell below replacement in 1972, falling to 1.8 by 1984, then rising back above replacement by 2007, then falling to 1.79 today. Despite being below replacement for 53 of the last 54 years, overall US population has never declined.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-cha...

[Retric]

There’s years where the population declined due to migration, the long term trend is very much a net positive.

Recent policies have resulted in significant population decline, but so far they are just another blip.

[bulbar]

> Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.

Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.

[fastball]

How do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%.

Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.

[Tor3]

Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.

[pseudo0]

The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.

[roryirvine]

The average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial.

Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.

Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).

[Tor3]

It only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.

[kmijyiyxfbklao]

How is 1500 years ago a short time frame? Yeah, people moved, but how many people in what amount of time is important.

And places become more boring if the have the same migrants as every other place, not less boring.

[bulbar]

Fair enough, that's not insignificant. As a German, I feel sorry that you feel the UK got flooded with my people, as they are one of the biggest part of the immigrants.

My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.

Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.

[diericx]

The US opened the border significantly during the Biden administration and it caused plenty of issues worth worrying about. I think that is a good example of opening the floodgates. But if you mean only in terms of affecting the population numbers then prob irrelevant.

[thrance]

> plenty of issues worth worrying about

Such as? It looks like the country is doing much worse now that the border is closed.

[red-iron-pine]

there is no birth rate solution.

but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.

[Erem]

Korea is starting to turn things around! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...

[Tor3]

Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.

[flakiness]

Maybe the fertility rate has to go below zero to bounce back... Japan's rate is like 1.14 yet [1].

Hopefully Korea has figure out something more actionable

[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/77220

[karmakurtisaani]

What's fertility rate below zero? Women not only have zero babies, they also sometimes kill babies of others?

[moi2388]

A rate below 0.99… so less than 1 kid per 2 adults

[karmakurtisaani]

Looks like that's below 1, but I don't have my glasses on so might be mistaken.

[moi2388]

It is, merely saying what he meant

[chaostheory]

> weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.

How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.

[saltyoldman]

In the united states the birthrate problem is largely climate change panic (which is not a reason to not have kids because other populations / immigrants start accelerating their birth rates), and then because of heavy migration and other market factors, home prices have skyrocketed. Many couples don't want to have kids until they at least buy their "starter house".

I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.

[armada651]

I guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.

[saltyoldman]

Well it's true, I've had so many girlfriends that have literally told me they are not sure about bringing more people into this world because there are already too many it's ruining the planet. Institutional brainwashing.

[Schiendelman]

What makes you call this "brainwashing"? Fewer kids really does mean less resource use.

[doctorwho42]

Well their economy isn't helping; they export a ton because it is more profitable to export than to sell domestically.

Their work culture actually rivals the US for toxicity.

And they dove into the modern technological society fully before anyone other than maybe Korea... Who is also having birth rate problems