You don't even need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Compare a 20 year old immigrant worker just arrived to a 20 year old who grew up here. They both start working and paying taxes on the same day.
So someone straight off the boat/EasyJet with wife and two children in tow, working as a deliver man/food packer pays more tax in his first year than required by schooling/health/maternity care/defence budget/whatever, even though he's likely to be on minimum wage or close to it? That's not counting immigrants with extended families of aged parents/grandparents.
The low birth rate in Western countries is a time bomb for anyone who cares about indigenous cultures. The subtext is we don't want kids, so let's bring in poor foreigners who haven't been educated out of reproduction. That is the state of liberalism today, short-termist and mercenary with pretensions to progressive inclusivity.
Only if you ignore the massive increases in life expectancy and drop in child mortality rates. This is basic high school stuff really.
Perhaps in your high school, in most others declining birth rates are a plain fact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...g-despite-an-increasing-world-population.html
I don't believe I have to spell this out...
There's a population shortfall even accounting for increased longevity. The liberal solution is import people, preferably those with lower expectations than the indigenous population, and allow them to pay for the higher standard of living of the existing residents in the long term. I believe cultural integrity and national diversity are things worth hanging on to. You can achieve those by controlling the number of people residing in a country so that the existing culture can assimilate them without being assimilated by them. That's the nub of the argument. If you view culture in Darwinian terms open borders are a fascinating experiment. If you want to conserve a cultural eco-system that has taken centuries to evolve, some control is necessary. As a social conservative I'm against the social laboratory approach.I don't believe I have to spell this out...
For a population to remain stable the birth rate has to be the same as the death rate.
Historically, the combination of high infant mortality and poor health care generally meant that families needed to produce anywhere between three and five children just to keep numbers steady.
Advances in health care generally and perinatal care specifically meant that from the late 19th century onwards fewer and fewer children are required to maintain the population size (typically now it's 2.1 children per couple).
However, up until the 1960s it was difficult for women to control their own fertility and so birth rates were still relatively high - hence the huge growth in population of the 1930s onwards (the baby boom wasn't so much due to an increase in birth rates, but due to more babies surviving).
Throw in the fact that life expectancy increased by 50% or more since the late 1800s and low birth rates aren't a problem, they are a necessary requirement if we are to avoid the worst effects of overpopulation. The world population took 123 years to grow from 1B to 2B, and only 85 years to go from 2B to 7B.
The developing world is still on the front side of these population demographic curves - the green revolution allowed them to support larger and larger populations on the same amount of arable land which has lead to surges in populations. However, increased affluence is leading to similar cultural changes as we experienced in the west - more women are seeking education and controlling their fertility as a way out of being baby-making machines. Over the next couple of decades we will most likely see their birth rates dropping in a similar fashion to how they have in the West.
Edit: Just wanted to add the chart below which makes the rate of population growth over the last century quite clear:
Some people concede culture too easily, others are secretly or not-so-secretly pleased with the international melting pot of borderless mega-states. I'd want far more assurances about the aims and limitations of transnationalism before giving up discrete nation statehood. I especially disagree with the idea of the EU as "democratic" in the sense most people would define the word. The push for globalism is neither inevitable nor accidental.
VAT on the food, clothes and other items that they buy, duty on the cigarettes they smoke and the beer they drink, VED and IPT for the car they drive, and duty on the fuel for it...
Only because we're waiting for the baby boom generation to die off.
Should be? What eugenic nonsense is this?
Nice try, but nothing to do with eugenics. 'Should be' as in 'based on current trends, the population should be around 5 to 6 billion by 2050'.
Based on current trends, Westerners aren't having enough children to maintain an identifiable cultural presence in a century's time. My only hope is the influx from African and Asian Christian countries maintains a historical religious connection.
I'm struggling to see the problem. When you can walk down the street in Beijing eating a Big Mac and sipping on Starbucks, and when Benedict Cumberbatch gets mobbed by Sherlock fans while filming in Tibet I don't think Western culture has anything to worry about.
If you can't see the difference between over a thousand years of Christian history, a highly developed parliamentary democracy, and an enviable depth of creative endeavour, and fast food, it's a waste of time exploring the alternatives.
If you can't see that 'they' want to be like 'us' more than the other way around then I agree it's pointless.
As I've never seen "Sherlock", am only familiar with Benedict Cumberbatch from posters, can't remember when I last ate a Big Mac, and have never knowingly had a Starbucks, your us is somewhat misplaced.
I intend to outlive the burger eating, coffee drinking, TV addicted liberal narcissists. Why eschewing such cultural abominations should be considered "abhorrent" is something best kept to yourself.
They when the life expectancy means that more people survive to reproductive age. Average life expectancy isn't just about the max, it also moves the median.
