Eventually, developed and aging countries like Japan or South Korea have to import immigrants or simply die away gradually. Either way, their cultures are going to cease the way they are today.
The criteria for what makes a country "developed" will shift: at the moment, it's stuff like 24/7 reliable electricity and communications grids, fresh water and sewage grids, transportation infrastructure, access to healthcare, affordable quality housing and food. As a result of that being available, particularly healthcare, food and water, reproduction rates will fall as you don't need six children to hope one makes it to an old enough age to be a caregiver. We're seeing this pattern already with first and second generation migrants from countries with high reproduction rates.
> Immigration as a solution to population decline seems like a temporary fix.
It doesn't need to be more then a temporary fix: those countries who are rich at the moment will still be rich in the future and continue to invent stuff - the new marker for "developed" may then be "basic labor is done by robots", so there won't be any more need for more immigration. The crucial issue is that Western societies are hard-wired on judging people by their employment - my fear is that in a world with declining employment rates, we'll end up with a small caste of ultra rich elites, and a mob of people who may enjoy what we call a "high standard of living" in our standards, but still fighting for status aka the few jobs that will exist, and there will be lots of people blaming immigrants again.
>If say, blue deep state dysfunction keeps getting worse, and it ends up couped by reds who purge & reform the federal government along the lines of less handouts, more guns, and set up the system so that political power of unproductive classes is minimized, woke may just die out.
Wow.
I have heard this before, I kind of think that there is a nontrivial percentage of people that hope or believe that we will solve aging within their lifetime and that having kids isn’t necessary.
India's population also continues to explode. We've been very successful assimilating Indian immigrants in the US.
This blog post is a great read on the importance of institutions and how assimilation has succeeded with past immigrant waves: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-tran... The tl;dr is that in principle, it's possible to imagine a South Korea in the year 2100 which is 80% descended from African immigrants and functions more or less the same way it does today. The immigrants just have to come at a slow enough rate that they adopt to the local way of doing things instead of overwhelming it. Probably would work best with a points-based immigration system similar to what Canada has. Also getting the host country to accept the new arrivals would also be an important challenge. In my opinion, more countries should follow France's lead and establish a foreign legion, so even right-wingers have to acknowledge that immigrants are helping the country out.
I don't see any reason why anyone should take those projections seriously. Countries went from booms to baby busts in the span of few decades.
2. This shrinking will be painful as our current structure relies on young caring for old, either directly as part of families or indirectly via tax-funded social programs. If there are not enough young people to pay taxes for the welfare, what should we do about the old ones? Let them die? Let them rot away in loneliness[1]? Force them to work till they die[2]? Or nudge them towards euthanasia like Canada does[3]?
[1] another recent NYT article on this subject: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/health/elderly-living-alo...
[2] see the debate about raising medicare age to 67
These people are already there and decline rate seems tragically unsustainable.
Shrinking population would be somewhat OK if it would be organic.
There is all the reason to believe that. In the past few years, Japan took in a record number of immigrants, and yet they still werent able to stop the population decline. They lost ~600,000 people/year in total or during that time period, if i remember right. 'Some adjustments' wont fix that. A total overhaul of the society is necessary.
Most online descriptions of Japanese people appear as caricatures, but from the few who I know who live in Japan, they are like any other human group: if some form of continuity or success is the only form accessible they will accept it.
In this regard it would make sense to eat it up and accept population decline. Japan of 50 million Japanese is still Japan. Japan of 40 million Japanese and 40 million Filipino is no longer Japan. May still be passable country, though.
The US currently gets more Asian immigrants than Latinos.
That plus rigging the statistics to display much more favorable numbers.