Besides, at least in Europe free immigration would lead to massive civil unrest and possibly civil war, which would kill even more. You can not have free immigration into societies where the whole nation is ethnically defined without destabilizing them and most of the non-American world is ethnically defined. Mass migration is not a viable solution to population growth.
Nah. In the long term, societies will adapt. Sure there will be a lot of xenophobia and stupid "culture wars" in the meantime, but eventually even the most backward people will have to accept the fact that they live in a multicultural society, and there's nothing they can do to change that.
To quote Keynes: "In the long run we are all dead". Lots of bad stuff can happen in the meantime.
Just to be clear: I was talking about free immigration = everyone can enter. Which would cause massive and sudden social upheaval. Not a general high level of immigration.
DeadFlagBlues seems to be in favour of unlimited immigration.
Your faith in the inevitable triumph of multiculturalism in the entire Western world is far too deterministic. Probably because you view the issue through a normative lens.
It is better to hope that economic growth will take off in Africa and the Middle East (the former is happening, just not quite fast enough). People generally do not leave their homeland when their living standard is around 25-35% of the countries they aim for. Not sure if those levels will hold, but there are costs (cultural, emotional/family wise, economic etc.) connected to migrating. At some point in their development countries stop producing huge numbers of migrants. - and that point is well before they reach the level of the rich world.
Climate change could skew this up by destroying living conditions, but hopefully we can handle that. In general mass migration is a very bad and conflict prone way of handling population growth.
War refugees seems likely to be more numerous, but should be distributed to countries with a culture and norms compatible to theirs, not by wherever the refuges happen to go. At some point there will hopefully be better UN coordination of this, otherwise more and more countries will likely just stop (de facto) accepting refugees.
As an example Arabs seem to do quit well in Latin America, while they clash head in with locals in Europe - whereas Asians do well in Europe. I think at some point there will have to be a global solution to this.
The whole refugee concept is also dated (mostly designed for political dissident from the Eastern bloc) and not well suited to the modern world, where economic motives mix with oppression and the situation is closer to the 19th century migration of Europeans to America than the refugee situation in the 50s and 60s (using very broad strokes here, I know).
Most countries don't mind taking refugees
if they is a decent chance they are going home at some point, but a lot of countries (incl. some affluent ones in Asia) are not interested in changing their population profile and that needs to be respected - a guarantee that some other countries will take them if it turns out to be impossible to repatriate refugees would make it more realistic to persuade Europe, Japan and Korea etc. to take more. A more rational and realistic refugee policy is badly needed. As it is we are just undermining the whole system.
