This one’s easily solved by removing restrictions on immigration

Not really. No country has all the resources to make or assembly all the critical items we all consume. We need people where they are so they can continue to make/produce/assemble.

This is the worst argument against immigration I’ve ever heard

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.

This is good for almost every living thing on the planet, lol.

In the UK we are hellbent on completely cutting immigration, and the same people who want to stop immigration also don’t want to do anything to help more young people become more financially stable which would naturally lead to more births. Neoliberalism put us in the hole and people think fascism will get us out.

Speaking personally, I genuinely couldn’t afford to have kids as well as pay for a mortgage/rent and own a car. If I can’t get a mortgage or pay rent, I’m living with my parents forever. If I can’t have a car, I can’t get around very well because public transport where I live is shit. Therefore limited work options. So the obvious choice is to not have kids.

I agree this is going to become an even bigger problem in the future, if wealth inequality continues to grow and young people are left with a feeling of hopelessness unable to have a respectable quality of life.

People are finally realizing that the current state of the world is abysmal for bringing a child into. My wife and I don’t plan on kids anyway, but even if we did, there’s no way in hell we could afford to within the next decade, not to mention how irresponsible it feels to introduce a new life to this fascist shithole.

I cannot believe my brother chose to have kids. There’s no chance in hell I’d subject another human to this.

I would not even bring a dog into this world, let alone a human.

Adopt one? Absolutely. Intentionally breed for puppies? Hell no.

This is only a problem if you view humans as more important than the rest of the living world. Like all of it.