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Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

> given the social cost of divorce

I think they're more concerned about their fertility rate and labor force. A 0.87 total fertility rate for 2025 [1] is pretty bad.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/singapore-low-fertili...

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Western governments don't seem at all concerned about this, unfortunately. They no longer represent the people, they represent the economy. And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand. Culture, stability, safety, happiness, long-term prosperity and survival be damned.

What aspect of that do you want them to be concerned about? The bigger concern was population growth, it is nearly impossible for living standards to keep rising if the population is growing exponentially - at some point the number of new mouths overwhelmed the ability to produce food and some sort of underclass has to form. We need at least stabilisation at some point and it seems the easiest way to achieve that is to wobble between growth and decay.

We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.

> And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand.

This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.

No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.

But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism

>In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses.

It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.

I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.

Mandated or not, degrowth of businesses would be disastrous for the people of any country. Your children won't have much of a future in your homeland if there are no economic opportunities for them when they are adults. They might even leave the homeland for good finding those opportunities elsewhere and becoming immigrants themselves. A tale as old as time for nearly every country whose economy hits the toilet the way you think the government should force it to

Believe me, if you ask the locals there they would mostly say the same thing about their government too.

In Singapore?

I think it is hard to find many places right now in today's environment where people feel their government look after their interests. But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...

At the top of my head the only places I can think of where citizens get a comparably good deal are Switzerland, Dubai, Norway maybe Monaco (don't actually know on this one).

Most countries don't import (and naturalize) as many foreigners while expecting the locals to serve national service. There's also this quip from a minister some time ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37627269

The same immigrants that started 50% of all American unicorns?

Unicorns that are now destroying America, its democracy and threated to take rest of the world along. So, it might not be all that great argument.

>importing millions of unskilled adult migrants

There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.

The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work.

Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.

Also, government incentives to have children usually stimulates immigrants and poor people anyway, if your argument is purely ethnoracial. You may as well take the 23-year-old Indian or Algerian dude. There is very little the government can do to make a white couple in Connecticut have babies.

>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.

That was exactly what govs did here in western europe for our mines (to strikebreak) and what they do for harbour workers and few other industries still. It also incidentally makes up most of the migrants coming in even if they aren't technically imported. Sufficient open doors, incentives and looking the other way to form the expectation of likely settlement ends up amounting to the same though.

>The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work. Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically like planting a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.

I can only feel utter disgust at that kind of rethoric. The idea that a state works for it's citizens and a nationstate advances it's nation(s) is anathema replaced with treating people like fungibles economic tokens.

It also doesn't hold up since the lifetime contribution of your average non-eu migrant ends up negative in more expansive studies. (With extreme variance between origins.)

What's next? Are we going to have shortsighted economists pushing citizens to emigrate again when they don't fill their desired economic roles (like the UK did during windrush times) and replace from abroad to maximise their average economic output?

It's sad and hard to admit that we're shaped by our government and the result is 1984-ugly.

It's under 0.8 in 2026 as their birth numbers declined by 12% in Q1. Doesn't really matter right now as they should be able to keep importing from the sinosphere for another 15-20 years.

If they're concerned about fertility rate and labor force only, then they haven't put even a modicum of thought into this, as nuclear families have significantly better outcomes than single parents. It affects everything from employment outcomes to criminal rates and more.

So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?

This is an insane leap of logic

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