How have Finland and Japan suffered/benefitted from lack of immigration?

[rob in cal]

I believe Finland (until recently  anyway) and Japan are two examples of modern industrial societies with low rates of immigration.  It would be interesting to see if anyone has used them as case studies of the positive and negatives of immigration, in terms of the economy, impact on local working classes, society in general etc.

[Indy Texas]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

Watch the BBC documentary No Sex, Please - We're Japanese. It's about Japan's declining population and the young Japanese lack of interest not just in marriage but in dating or sexual relationships. They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An29bdpaY70

[Gustaf]

Finland is doing pretty well but I would say they are a bit limited in international exposure. That might have more to do with their historic location though.

[DC Al Fine]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

[Indy Texas]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

If you want to sustain a high birth rate, you have to reduce the cost of having children. That requires reducing the cost of higher education, healthcare and childcare. It also requires creating more equity in primary and secondary education. If you can do away with the prevailing system where living in the "wrong" school district might mean your child can't get into a decent university, you could likely solve a lot of the problem of single-family housing affordability in major cities because there would be no incentive to bid up prices in certain areas.

But even that is necessary but not sufficient. Birth rates in countries that do more to offer these things, such as the Nordic countries, are higher than in Japan but still below replacement rate.

Japan - 1.40 births/woman
Germany - 1.43 births/woman
China - 1.55 births/woman
Canada - 1.59 births/woman
Finland - 1.73 births/woman
Denmark - 1.73 births/woman
Iceland - 1.88 births/woman
Sweden - 1.88 births/woman
United Kingdom - 1.90 births/woman
United States - 2.01 births/woman
France - 2.08 births/woman (highest birthrate in Western Europe)
Source

[Famous Mortimer]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

If you want to sustain a high birth rate, you have to reduce the cost of having children. That requires reducing the cost of higher education, healthcare and childcare. It also requires creating more equity in primary and secondary education. If you can do away with the prevailing system where living in the "wrong" school district might mean your child can't get into a decent university, you could likely solve a lot of the problem of single-family housing affordability in major cities because there would be no incentive to bid up prices in certain areas.

But even that is necessary but not sufficient. Birth rates in countries that do more to offer these things, such as the Nordic countries, are higher than in Japan but still below replacement rate.

Japan - 1.40 births/woman
Germany - 1.43 births/woman
China - 1.55 births/woman
Canada - 1.59 births/woman
Finland - 1.73 births/woman
Denmark - 1.73 births/woman
Iceland - 1.88 births/woman
Sweden - 1.88 births/woman
United Kingdom - 1.90 births/woman
United States - 2.01 births/woman
France - 2.08 births/woman (highest birthrate in Western Europe)
Source

No one is kept out of any University because of what school district they lived in. Colleges don't care what high school you went to as long as you graduated and got good grades.

[politicus]

All previous responses are focused on the economy, but a lower population is an enviromental gain and that becomes more important in the future. In the end the entire planet needs to get a shrinking population if we are to survive. Having to take care of a large elderly population on the other hand is a temporary problem.

[muon2]

Canada's birth rate has fallen so much that deaths should soon be outnumbering births and the total population is predicted to be declining by 2030.

Interesting comments in the linked article suggest that a governmental attempt to increase fertility comes with two downsides. One is the political fallout of being seen as interfering in the bedroom. The other is the economic problem of trying to boost fertility during the bubble of seniors from the Baby Boom. That would add dependent children to dependent seniors during a period of minimal workforce.

[Indy Texas]

No one is kept out of any University because of what school district they lived in. Colleges don't care what high school you went to as long as you graduated and got good grades.

I can assure you that is not true. Being an honors student at Mediocre Inner City School X is a very different animal from being an honors student at a private or high-end public school. You see that in their test scores.

My mother used to teach in one of the worse school districts in Houston and you had kids who got all or nearly all A's in their classes but their SAT or ACT scores were way below the medians you needed for any of the prominent universities in Texas, and their admissions essays bordered on incoherent and something a sixth grader might have written.

[Famous Mortimer]

No one is kept out of any University because of what school district they lived in. Colleges don't care what high school you went to as long as you graduated and got good grades.

I can assure you that is not true. Being an honors student at Mediocre Inner City School X is a very different animal from being an honors student at a private or high-end public school. You see that in their test scores.

My mother used to teach in one of the worse school districts in Houston and you had kids who got all or nearly all A's in their classes but their SAT or ACT scores were way below the medians you needed for any of the prominent universities in Texas, and their admissions essays bordered on incoherent and something a sixth grader might have written.

You're proving my point. The reason they didn't get into a good college is because they were dumb (bad SAT scores, no writing skills), not because of what school district they were from.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

No one is kept out of any University because of what school district they lived in. Colleges don't care what high school you went to as long as you graduated and got good grades.

I can assure you that is not true. Being an honors student at Mediocre Inner City School X is a very different animal from being an honors student at a private or high-end public school. You see that in their test scores.

My mother used to teach in one of the worse school districts in Houston and you had kids who got all or nearly all A's in their classes but their SAT or ACT scores were way below the medians you needed for any of the prominent universities in Texas, and their admissions essays bordered on incoherent and something a sixth grader might have written.

You're proving my point. The reason they didn't get into a good college is because they were dumb (bad SAT scores, no writing skills), not because of what school district they were from.

You don't think what school they went to could have had anything to do with how and why they turned out 'dumb'?

[Heimdal]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

In the entire industrialized world, having children is expensive. In earlier centuries you needed children to take care of you in your old age, and to help out on the farm. This incentive is gone in the welfare state, since the state will provide for you. On the other hand you need a population on at least replacement level to actually sustain a modern welfare state.
 
The question is what sort of incentives you need to encourage people to have children. The Nordic countries (and France) are obviously doing something right. You need a system that enables people to have children, while allowing them to have a professional career. This means that you need easy access to daycare facilities. These daycare centers also have to be affordable. I think this is the case in most of Scandinavia, and maybe France.

I believe you can take it even further. An interesting idea is allowing people to deduct a fixed amount of money from their taxable income for every child. This wouldn’t affect the rich, since they wouldn’t need such a deduction. Since this would take the form of a deduction (rather than a direct contribution), you don’t incentivize people on welfare to have too many children.  It would affect the working class and middle class wage earners that are the mainstay of the workforce.

So I think there are a lot of ways to maintain a decent birth rate. However, it calls for an activist state.

[Famous Mortimer]

No one is kept out of any University because of what school district they lived in. Colleges don't care what high school you went to as long as you graduated and got good grades.

I can assure you that is not true. Being an honors student at Mediocre Inner City School X is a very different animal from being an honors student at a private or high-end public school. You see that in their test scores.

My mother used to teach in one of the worse school districts in Houston and you had kids who got all or nearly all A's in their classes but their SAT or ACT scores were way below the medians you needed for any of the prominent universities in Texas, and their admissions essays bordered on incoherent and something a sixth grader might have written.

You're proving my point. The reason they didn't get into a good college is because they were dumb (bad SAT scores, no writing skills), not because of what school district they were from.

You don't think what school they went to could have had anything to do with how and why they turned out 'dumb'?

A little, but the impact is overstated. Most American schools, good AND bad, are just daycare. If anyone comes out of any school with any intelligence it's because of their own intellectual curiosity.

[Famous Mortimer]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

In the entire industrialized world, having children is expensive. In earlier centuries you needed children to take care of you in your old age, and to help out on the farm. This incentive is gone in the welfare state, since the state will provide for you. On the other hand you need a population on at least replacement level to actually sustain a modern welfare state.
 
The question is what sort of incentives you need to encourage people to have children. The Nordic countries (and France) are obviously doing something right. You need a system that enables people to have children, while allowing them to have a professional career. This means that you need easy access to daycare facilities. These daycare centers also have to be affordable. I think this is the case in most of Scandinavia, and maybe France.

I believe you can take it even further. An interesting idea is allowing people to deduct a fixed amount of money from their taxable income for every child. This wouldn’t affect the rich, since they wouldn’t need such a deduction. Since this would take the form of a deduction (rather than a direct contribution), you don’t incentivize people on welfare to have too many children.  It would affect the working class and middle class wage earners that are the mainstay of the workforce.

So I think there are a lot of ways to maintain a decent birth rate. However, it calls for an activist state.

Giving a deduction for every child is EXACTLY what we do in America and it has absolutely incentivized it for poor people to have children.

[Tender Branson]

Canada's birth rate has fallen so much that deaths should soon be outnumbering births and the total population is predicted to be declining by 2030.

Interesting comments in the linked article suggest that a governmental attempt to increase fertility comes with two downsides. One is the political fallout of being seen as interfering in the bedroom. The other is the economic problem of trying to boost fertility during the bubble of seniors from the Baby Boom. That would add dependent children to dependent seniors during a period of minimal workforce.

Nope.

This article is from 2008.

The official numbers from Statistics Canada show a much different picture:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-215-x/2013002/t106-eng.htm

In 2006/07, the number of births in CAN was 361.000, in the year 2012/13 they stood at 384.000, an increase of 23.000 births.

The number of deaths went from 234.000 to 253.000, an increase of 19.000 - which means births actually increased by more than 2.000 vs. deaths over that period.

CAN also has massive immigration, which also benefits the birth rate - because these immigrants often come from Asian or African countries - where the birth rate is traditionally higher than in Canada (which in turn helps raise the Canadian birth rate).

(A similar phenomenon can also be seen in Vienna recently, where the birth rate was lowest among all Austrian states in the 70s, but because of immigration in the recent decades, it now has the highest birth rate among all states and a healthy birth surplus.)

In fact, CAN even has a higher immigration rate than the US right now: The population grew by 1.1% in 2013, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and 0.7% from immigration.

The US only grew 0.7%, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and just 0.3% from immigration.

[Heimdal]

Japan is dying a slow death because they have no way to compensate for their structurally low, post-industrial birthrates.

snip

They show one town where the local primary school has been closed and boarded up and the maternity wing of the local hospital has been shuttered and converted into storage rooms. In other words, it's basically DC Al Fine's version of Hell.

Pretty much

As for the OP. I wouldn't say Japan is "suffering" from a low birth rate, but they are closing their eyes to the most obvious solution to a different problem. All else equal I think a nation is better off maintaining a higher birthrate with lower lower immigration.

The question is, how do you maintain a higher birth rate? In our current society, I think replacement is about the best you can do.

In the entire industrialized world, having children is expensive. In earlier centuries you needed children to take care of you in your old age, and to help out on the farm. This incentive is gone in the welfare state, since the state will provide for you. On the other hand you need a population on at least replacement level to actually sustain a modern welfare state.
 
The question is what sort of incentives you need to encourage people to have children. The Nordic countries (and France) are obviously doing something right. You need a system that enables people to have children, while allowing them to have a professional career. This means that you need easy access to daycare facilities. These daycare centers also have to be affordable. I think this is the case in most of Scandinavia, and maybe France.

I believe you can take it even further. An interesting idea is allowing people to deduct a fixed amount of money from their taxable income for every child. This wouldn’t affect the rich, since they wouldn’t need such a deduction. Since this would take the form of a deduction (rather than a direct contribution), you don’t incentivize people on welfare to have too many children.  It would affect the working class and middle class wage earners that are the mainstay of the workforce.

So I think there are a lot of ways to maintain a decent birth rate. However, it calls for an activist state.

Giving a deduction for every child is EXACTLY what we do in America and it has absolutely incentivized it for poor people to have children.

This economic incentive is just one part of a larger package. But how big is this deduction?

[muon2]

Canada's birth rate has fallen so much that deaths should soon be outnumbering births and the total population is predicted to be declining by 2030.

Interesting comments in the linked article suggest that a governmental attempt to increase fertility comes with two downsides. One is the political fallout of being seen as interfering in the bedroom. The other is the economic problem of trying to boost fertility during the bubble of seniors from the Baby Boom. That would add dependent children to dependent seniors during a period of minimal workforce.

Nope.

This article is from 2008.

The official numbers from Statistics Canada show a much different picture:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-215-x/2013002/t106-eng.htm

In 2006/07, the number of births in CAN was 361.000, in the year 2012/13 they stood at 384.000, an increase of 23.000 births.

The number of deaths went from 234.000 to 253.000, an increase of 19.000 - which means births actually increased by more than 2.000 vs. deaths over that period.

CAN also has massive immigration, which also benefits the birth rate - because these immigrants often come from Asian or African countries - where the birth rate is traditionally higher than in Canada (which in turn helps raise the Canadian birth rate).

(A similar phenomenon can also be seen in Vienna recently, where the birth rate was lowest among all Austrian states in the 70s, but because of immigration in the recent decades, it now has the highest birth rate among all states and a healthy birth surplus.)

In fact, CAN even has a higher immigration rate than the US right now: The population grew by 1.1% in 2013, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and 0.7% from immigration.

The US only grew 0.7%, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and just 0.3% from immigration.

I worried about the age of the link when I posted, so I checked the CIA Factbook. They list Canada's fertility rate for 2014 at 1.59 births/woman which ranks at 181 out of 224 countries. The 2014 estimate for the US is 2.01 births/woman which ranks at 123. The immigration rate may be large, but the fertility rate in Canada doesn't seem to show much of a bump from those immigrants.

[Tender Branson]

Canada's birth rate has fallen so much that deaths should soon be outnumbering births and the total population is predicted to be declining by 2030.

Interesting comments in the linked article suggest that a governmental attempt to increase fertility comes with two downsides. One is the political fallout of being seen as interfering in the bedroom. The other is the economic problem of trying to boost fertility during the bubble of seniors from the Baby Boom. That would add dependent children to dependent seniors during a period of minimal workforce.

Nope.

This article is from 2008.

The official numbers from Statistics Canada show a much different picture:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-215-x/2013002/t106-eng.htm

In 2006/07, the number of births in CAN was 361.000, in the year 2012/13 they stood at 384.000, an increase of 23.000 births.

The number of deaths went from 234.000 to 253.000, an increase of 19.000 - which means births actually increased by more than 2.000 vs. deaths over that period.

CAN also has massive immigration, which also benefits the birth rate - because these immigrants often come from Asian or African countries - where the birth rate is traditionally higher than in Canada (which in turn helps raise the Canadian birth rate).

(A similar phenomenon can also be seen in Vienna recently, where the birth rate was lowest among all Austrian states in the 70s, but because of immigration in the recent decades, it now has the highest birth rate among all states and a healthy birth surplus.)

In fact, CAN even has a higher immigration rate than the US right now: The population grew by 1.1% in 2013, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and 0.7% from immigration.

The US only grew 0.7%, with 0.4% coming from natural increase and just 0.3% from immigration.

I worried about the age of the link when I posted, so I checked the CIA Factbook. They list Canada's fertility rate for 2014 at 1.59 births/woman which ranks at 181 out of 224 countries. The 2014 estimate for the US is 2.01 births/woman which ranks at 123. The immigration rate may be large, but the fertility rate in Canada doesn't seem to show much of a bump from those immigrants.

Problem with the CIA factbook is that they are often wrong and not anywhere near the actual official figures from the countries' statistical offices ...

For example, the CIA factbook also shows a population stagnation for Austria (+0.01%), when in fact the population went up by 0.60% last year (or 50.000 people).

Also, birth and death rates are completely wrong. Basically A LOT there is wrong.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/au.html

[Tender Branson]

It's true that CAN has a slightly lower fertility rate than the US (1.65 vs. 1.88), but it's also true that CAN has a lower death rate than the US, which in the end evens out the natural increase in both countries.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_09.pdf

Again, the CIA-factbook is wrong: They say the fertility rate is over 2, when it's only 1.88

[Gustaf]

It's a pretty simple numbers game. It would take massive immigration and a large difference in birth rates for it to affect the national birth rate. And that's just not the reality of the situation.