After the Brussels conference last month I took four days off and went to visit my old stomping grounds in the north of England. The part of England where I used to live — the Yorkshire Dales — is many miles away from the post-industrial slums and crime-ridden behavioral sinks described so effectively by Theodore Dalrymple. The area has changed in the last forty years, but it’s still recognizably the old Yorkshire I knew.And it’s also older. As people reach retirement age they leave the cities and inner suburbs and move to places like Ripon, Knaresborough, and Thirsk. Life there is pleasant and civilized, with a low crime rate, plenty of amenities, and only a few immigrants here and there. I can see why people migrate there; it’s a delightful place.
The preponderance of retired people was evident in all the small towns I visited. Sometimes it seemed that the only children I saw were visiting there as tourists with their parents.
The demography of Britain, like everywhere else in the West, is graying. To add to the trend, the rate of emigration is accelerating even as the influx of new Third World immigrants reaches record highs.
According to The Daily Mail:
Half a million foreigners came to live and work in Britain last year as immigration hit new records, official figures showed.- - - - - - - - -
Nearly a quarter of a million said they came for jobs and more than 150,000 more arrived as students.
At the same time, an unprecedented total of more than 200,000 Britons left to live abroad.
The breakdown from the Government’s Office for National Statistics shows that the number of foreigners coming to live in Britain went up by nearly ten per cent in a year.
Fewer than one in five were from Eastern European countries. They were outnumbered by migrants from Commonwealth countries in the Indian sub-continent and Africa.
Most new arrivals were heading for London and the South East.
The unprecedented wave of foreign citizens came as a record number of British people joined the exodus for new lives elsewhere. For the first time ever, more than 200,000 British citizens left the country in a single year. Some 207,000 turned their backs on the UK, more than half the total of 400,000 people heading overseas.
Most of the Britons went to Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain or the U.S.
[…]
Including returning Britons, 591,000 people came to live in this country last year. The figure for net immigration — the number who arrived minus the number who left — showed the population swelling by 191,000. Overall, there was a gain of 316,000 foreign citizens and a loss of 126,000 Britons.
The departing natives are likely to be the most skilled and ambitious Britons, people in their prime who want to escape confiscatory taxation, crime, and the barriers to entrepreneurship that are the common characteristics of mature European socialism.
When they go, they leave behind a large cohort of lower middle class uneducated and unsocialized young men with no marketable skills and an indifference to the law, not to mention the immigrants and their descendants, most of them Muslims.
If there was ever a recipe for serious social trouble, this is it. Things can’t continue as they are — everybody knows that. It’s only a question of when the camel’s back will finally break. Given the accelerating trends, it could be sooner rather than later.
And it’s not just Britain. According to The Local, Sweden set a new record last year by taking in 95,750 immigrants, while persons of Swedish background are departing in record numbers.
So ethnic Europeans, the dreaded white hegemons, are voluntarily declining into oblivion. While they do, the overwhelmingly Muslim immigrants brought in under the Eurabian project are reproducing rapidly even as more and more of their compatriots arrive.
Here’s a report from LifeSite on the demographic trend in Germany:
Expected that one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025
By Gudrun Schultz
Germany’s downward spiral in population is no longer reversible, the country’s federal statistics office said Tuesday. The birthrate has dropped so low that immigration numbers cannot compensate.
“The fall in the population can no longer be stopped,” vice-president Walter Rademacher with the Federal Statistics Office said, reported Agence France-Presse.
Germany has the lowest birthrate in Europe, with an average of 1.36 children per woman. Despite government incentives to encourage larger families, the population is dropping rapidly and that trend will continue, with an expected loss of as much as 12 million by 2050. That would mean about a 15 percent drop from the country’s current population of 82.4 million, the German news source Deutsche Welle reported today.
[ … ]
Germany has one of the largest populations of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, with a Muslim community of over 3 million. That trend is expected to continue, leading some demographic trend-watchers to warn that the country is well on the way to becoming a Muslim state by 2050, Deutsche Welle reported.
The Brussels Journal reported last month that one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025. There are an estimated 50 million Muslims living in Europe today—that number is expected to double over the next twenty years.
The population losses faced by Germany reflect a trend occurring across Europe—The European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat has predicted an overall drop in Europe’s population of 7 million people by 2050.
The demographic decline coincides with a dramatic drop in Christian religious belief and a consequent rejection of Christian morality and emphasis on the benefits of family life and children.
While I was reading articles and collecting material for this post, the title of a Robert Heinlein novel kept running through my head: If This Goes On —
I wasn’t sure why, since it had been more than forty years since I last read the book. But it made sense once I did an internet search and found a synopsis of the plot:
John Lyle, Legate and Angel of the Lord, a member of the elite corps that guards the holy person of the Prophet Incarnate, has a sickness in his soul: he finds life at the Palace, capital of the former United States, disillusioning. While standing guard on a parapet one night, he meets Sister Judith — a fresh-caught Virgin, nervous about her coming service to the Prophet…
And to make the story even more interesting, there’s this:
The Cabal, an underground resistance group, or consortium of groups led by Freemasons and committed to restoring secular, democratic government to the United States.
Hmm.
If this goes on…
Hat tips: Jens, Fjordman, and TB.
16 comments:
It's a weird thing, to be part of culture that is dying off.
The one thing I can think of is that there are certain sub-groups within the West that have birthrates that have essentially dropped to zero or will continue dropping toward zero, whereas other groups maintain replacement or above replacement birthrates. So eventually those subgroups die off, but the others remain to grow.
For example, people say homosexuality is at least in part genetic. Well, before in the West, homosexuality was unacceptable and gay people would largley just live heterosexual lives, having children. Now, homosexuals are accepted more, and so live different "lifestyles" which generally don't involve having any kids at all. So that's one group that may just die out from the West, and so will cease to lower the birthrate as they do now.
There may be other genetic groups as well that are affected in the same way. But then there are social groups. Obviously, social groups can spread by persuasion, not just by reproduction, and so can take over reproductive social groups that way. But then some reproductive groups adapt so as not be "converted" if you will into the non-reproductive ideologies. Many Christian groups in the US and Canada have no problem holding rank and reproducing, such as by maintaining their own schools for example. There's groups like the "Quiverfull" groups that grew up as a direct response to the influences which lowered birthrates in the West. Many Western societal subgroups continue to grow.
I think it's quite right to worry about civil war though. The traditional peoples of Europe are going end up about as large or even smaller than the Islamic populations before they could ever possibly start growing again.
P.S.
Here's something else to consider: artificial wombs. It will be the West that has this technology before anyone else.
If a woman wants to be sexy, part of sexiness is attitude. An example of what attitude not to take is the following quote from Irina Dunn, an Australian feminist.
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
From my point of view, feminists like Irina Dunn can go kiss a bicycle. And I'll eat some fish.
An aging and shrinking population in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's happened before in this country and, at some point, people have simply started making babies again to make up the loss. The problem is the aging, shrinking native population coupled with massive immigration, which at one level gives the natives a sense of false security - if they believe the hype - that they'll have support in their old age without actually having to invest anything in it... immigration is actually a very selfish proposition, but what else can you expect from the Boomers?
OK, this sounds cavalier, but why don't the English start shagging?
Or does the Nanny State discriminate against families?
(I don't know, never been to Europe, not even as a jazz musician on tour, and can't pretend to be an expert on all things European).
Not quite sure that this matter is interesting for adolescent readers of this blog. But I have been long interested why western people quit to have children. And recently I found the answer by observing myself.
A couple of years ago I used to be an eager supporter of Republican party, solid right-winger and believed in wise Constitution of the US. At that time I already had three children and eagerly wanted to have more. Now, seing how the US is ruining itself by mass thrld-world immigration, and Republican party being the lobbist of that, I am changing my mind. I became more leftist on some issues, don't support war in Iraq any more and even hesitate if it is worthy voting for Republicans.
But the strangest change that I discovered in myself is that I don't want any more children! I became wicked and desperate inside, and I don't like children any more. And the reason is clearly that I lost the trust in the only authority which I trusted before.
So my conclusion is that in order to want children, people must have some trust and some authority in their heart. It may be a religious authority, or at least some statist authority for non-believers. Europeans, who trashed all their authorities, don't want to have children. It's so easy!
OT post:
So what's more disgusting, calls for immigration restriction or the garbage described here?
Two things:
"OK, this sounds cavalier, but why don't the English start shagging?"
This is going to sound polemic, but it isn't intended to be: In case you haven't noticed, there is no shortage of shagging going on in the West--it's a constant obsession, and there is no barrier to the unrestricted release of the libido--at any and every age--which Westerners will not tear down. The problem is abortion and contraception, but my guess is that since most readers of this blog are likely to be protestants, they'll reject this in favor of some other option. But there it is--an appallingly promiscuous society with no children.
This is connected to the second thing: ypp says he wants no more children because the only higher authority he believed in--the Republican Party and the US Constitution--has failed him. When the State replaces God, it cannot but fail to satisfy, and when that happens, we despair of the future. My suggestion to ypp--you want to get that enthusiasm for children back, try some other God. Like, I don't know, the God of Scripture.
That you still cling to the idea that some statist authority could satisfy human longing for ultimate meaning, and give people final hope in the future, tells me you absolutely HAVE to be European. The notion of the State (or some secular fanaticism) as a replacement for God is the entire problem, something Europeans simply can't get through their skulls.
When people have careers and ambition, or if there lives are unstable for any reason, they put off having children. Affluence leads to low birthrates (although it's not like we're going to go extinct or anything crazy like that).
If you're worried about culture for some inane reason, the best solution to an economic and demographic problem isn't walls and other physical or legal restrictions that will fail (fail, or lead to massive atrocities and fail). You have to counter an economic force with an economic force.
Affluence causes low birthrates and long-term poverty causes high birthrates, so the best answer is to improve the economies of developing countries until they also don't reproduce until they're 27. Moreover, people are coming to developed countries looking for work and money, so strengthening their home economies takes away that economic force.
I really don't care about the 'culture war' obsession you people have, but I don't like that Western governments and corporations have been crushing people and looting their resources, and this would solve both of our problems.
My wife and I just had baby #4. We are Catholic, and fairly devout, be enjoy life.
I think we'll stop now, as we have our hands full.
We will try to raise our children to be good citizens.
randomino,
Some examples to counter you are all the rich Muslim countries like Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Brunei. All of these countries have fully developed economies and their people are affluent, and yet they have high birthrates.
I doubt giving Qatarians any more money than the $63,000 GDP per capita they already have (which is around twice the German GDP per capita), is going to lower their fertility rates at all (which is around 3 times the German fertility rate).
I would argue a different direction in the correlation: it's not affluence that leads to low birthrates, but low birthrates that can add to affluence, at least in some systems, and for some time. Of course this is trivially true: not paying for the raising of new workers for 17-25 years, and instead importing them fully grown for free from other countries is going to save you a lot money, at least in the short term.
A quick look at the CIA World Factbook gives some surprising results for fertility. Iran, Algeria, Tunisia all have below replacement rate fertility. Iran's is IIRC around 1.7. Now Yemen's is quite high, around IIRC 9. Both Malaysia and Indonesia are also fairly high.
I think the explanations: lack of religious faith in religion or state, affluence causing selfishness, and other explanations miss the point.
You can find a pretty high back-of-the-envelope correlation between wealth and urbanization and drop in fertility rates, EVEN in fairly religious nations (Iran is quite religious).
My explanation goes like this: urbanization and wealth gives women independence. What women want with independence is not children but sex with lots of high-status men. Women will have children with the highest status man they can but will avoid children with men of perceived lower status (or lower status than "attainable" men). This explains the childless women in NYC who sensibly realize they won't land "Mr. Big" (of Sex and the City TV fame) if they have another man's child. Mr. Big will simply look elsewhere. Meanwhile Fox News obsession over murdered women by their many-married husbands (Staci and Laci Peterson, for example, the woman in Ohio, etc) are revealing. Lower class women won't settle for the "nice" but boring plumber, since they control their own destiny, instead they'll have kids with the most Alpha man around, a Scott Peterson, that other Peterson, the cop in Ohio (with kids by many women) as a means of tying him to them.
Feminists often charge that ordinary men seek to restrict sexuality and sexual choices of women. I agree and file that under "duh." If they don't women with power to live their own lives will on average (mind I'm ONLY SPEAKING OF AGGREGATE NOT INDIVIDUAL CHOICES!!!) will ON AVERAGE avoid having children with all men but the highest status men around.
For lower-status women unable to meet Mr. Big this leads to the most hyper-macho and often an over-estimation of the ability to change/control the socially dominant blue collar male (the Petersons, the Ohio cop). [It's astonishing to realize how successful both Petersons, the Ohio Cop were in meeting and impregnating attractive blue collar women.]
For middle class women, children are delayed until a Mr. Big can be landed. Often Mr. Big never comes around. Middle class women often overestimate the staying power of their beauty and the constant competition of younger women for Mr. Big.
I believe this explains the Frauenmangel of East Germany (pretty young women will move to the West, live in relative poverty, in women-only jobs such as secretaries, hoping to meet/romance Mr. Big) and the dearth of young men in NYC (or young East German men in the West). There are no jobs/openings for those who are not young, female, and pretty (and almost every young woman is pretty) in the West lacking advanced skills and conncetions, or places like NYC. The few young men who do arrive there soon learn that they lack the power/wealth/status/social dominance to be attractive to their young female peers. NYC and cities like them are for young women and powerful, wealthy men.
The net result is reproduction is being done by Mr. Big (when he does settle down or pretends to -- he might have many kids ala Wilt Chamberlain who boasted of sex with 10,000 women) and the blue-collar equivalent who may be far too hyper-macho. Meanwhile many (particularly blue collar young men) have literally no stake in society AND may seek to change the rules significantly. We certainly may be trending to defacto polygamy with all the instability that presents. [Of course women in general benefit by polygamy -- a small fraction of a wealthy/powerful man is worth more than all of an ordinary one, and pretty women can go far in polygamous and hierarchical societies.]
Given that the West's dynamism and social advantages were built by the common man having his own family and stake in society, and mobilization of the vast aggregate resources in all those ordinary men (as opposed to the few Mr. Bigs in polygamous societies) this is beyond just demographics though tied to it (not even Mr. Big can impregnate enough women to make up for the shortfall, for reasons listed above). We are also likely to see huge declines in productivity as men without families and no prospects find it useless to innovate since all that is rewarded is social dominance. Even beyond demographic declines we should expect economic collapse.
"OK, this sounds cavalier, but why don't the English start shagging?"
As mentioned, there's plenty of shagging in Britain.
But there's another issue that hasn't been mentioned. In Britain, the average wage is 25,000 pounds a year, and the average house costs over 200,000 pounds; how can a family afford to have children when both have to go out to work and still their house costs four times their combined annual income? Even if a woman wants be a stay-at-home mother, the cost of living makes that impossible for most.
The only people who can afford to have kids in the UK either bought a house years ago and are nearing the end of their child-bearing years, are rich enough to be able to pay for it on one income, or are on welfare. So the chavs on welfare pump out more and more feral kids who get pregnant at twelve and pump out the next generation, while the middle class have one or none, or emigrate to a country where they can afford to live.
BTW, I also agree with much of what whisky_199 said up above; much of the blame for the current situation can be laid squarely at the feminists and the myths they've created. What they seem to have missed is that matrilineal societies tend to be crude, violent and backward, precisely because it leaves most men with nothing productive to do.
Very good point Alien.
In 1970, an ordinary man could buy a house in the US. Not so now. A man's father could have a family, but not one now.
Such things usually start revolutions.
What good is cheap Playstations if you can't start a family?
Have more babies, Europeans!!! Please!
Falling birthrates in and of themselves aren't necessarily a big problem-- it's only when they're coupled with massive immigration (by different groups) that they become a problem, which is why places like the UK, Canada and the USA are facing such headaches.
Many Western countries have had fertility rates plummet before, whether due to war, depression, cultural shifts, whatever. No big deal so long as they avoid massive immigration-- the low birth rates just last a generation or so, values change to become more pro-natal, and population recovers and stabilizes. That's why the perils facing the West vary so much, country to country.
The UK IMHO is totally hosed, I don't see anything saving Britain. They have the triple-decker disaster sandwich of cratering birth rates (among native White Britons), ridiculously high long-term immigration mostly from Africa and South Asia to the tune of over 400,000 people a year (the much-ballyhood Polish influx is temporary, they leave after a little more than a year or often even less), *and* shockingly high rates of emigration of educated White Britons, 200-300 K a year and rising. To make matters worse, Britain is already way overcrowded, and the (predominantly African and S. Asian) immigrant populations have extremely high and sustained birth rates, esp. groups such as Zimbabweans, Somalis, Indians and Bangladeshis. Plus the UK itself may soon break apart. England in particular is screwed, I don't see any way to stop it.
Canada and the USA are also in a world of hurt. In Canada something like 1/4 of all babies are Muslims and Mohammed is the most common baby boy's name in much of the country, and per capita, Canada has close to the world's highest immigration levels with among the lowest birthrates anywhere for the White population. Much of BC is basically a Chinese colony. The USA does have somewhat higher White birthrates than the UK or Canada, but still well below replacement (1.6-1.7 is latest estimate) and actually *shrinking* as US regions become overcrowded from immigration. USA also has extremely high non-Euro immigration levels, White population already down to 65%, primary schools already majority non-Euro descent. Plus a national budget drunk on weapons spending that itself is financed by spiraling debt levels-- recipe for disaster and ethnic conflict.
New Zealand? Also screwed, heck the Maoris alone are maybe 1-2 generations from getting close to majority again with fertility rates, then there's also heavy immigration from rest of Pacific and Asian countries. Australia? Better, but not *a whole lot* better-- big-time intake from Africa/South Asia as well and increasing, some major cities already non-Euro, already a big and growing Somali, Lebanese, Indian, Filipino, Zimbabwean, Vietnamese, Indonesian contingent that will outnumber White population in a few decades.
I guess, the most reliably Western regions anymore are some parts of S. America and some regions of Euro Continent. Also falling birth rates there, but much less in the way of mass immigration. Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay among most Euro countries in world.
France? Ironically, their riots probably did some good-- the new laws come down very hard on North African/Arab immigration and basically bar it, while mass deportation of Arabs in France is increasingly common. The Algerians and Tunisians in France actually have a birthrate slightly lower than native French themselves, and many leave voluntarily with the country's new laws and Sarkozy's election.
I'm not worried about Germany at all, I go there frequently for business and IMHO, Germany will probably be among the most solid of Western countries in a couple decades. Yes, Germany has a low birthrate, but they're not mass-replacing themselves the way the UK is. Like France, Germany is somewhat lucky in that its Muslim contingent, the Turks, has decreasing birth rate itself (unlike South Asian/African Muslims in UK with extremely high birth rate), and in fact the Turks still there are leaving Germany in droves-- Germany's new immigration laws are very hostile to Turkish immigration, while Turkey's economy is attracting the Turks back.
Also, Germany has the good fortune of an extremely large German Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere and Eastern Europe that is being invited back-- millions of ethnic Germans in former USSR relocating to Germany for example, hundreds of thousands streaming in from South America, even increasing numbers moving in from North America. Especially the USA, has 80 million German-Americans and 90 million "Germanic-Americans" who have rights to move to Germany, with many doing so. Many are also quite religions, and this is contributing to gradual regaining of Christian culture in parts of Germany. I'm not worried about Germany at all. The rest of Europe is a patchwork, but I'm not too worried about the Mediterranean (also with pro-ethnic immigration, e.g. Italy gives special privileges to Italian-Americans to immigrate). Low Countries and Sweden I'm less sure of, but probably OK. Denmark and esp. Alpine countries like Austria and Switzerland have tough immigration policies, they'll be fine.
Only immigration of those who are colonizers for an alien totalitarian ideology is the problem.
Europe could have fewer Europeans and survive nicely.
But when they invited in their own antithesis, they guaranteed civil war, terror and their own likely diaspora if they fail to reverse this folly fast.
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