I like it; child birth is often ignored in these rankings, but without it a society collapses. You can’t just accept more immigrants because they may not want to assimilate into the culture or be capable of taking on the jobs left by the previous generations. GNI is also a good metric, I’ll have to start using it instead of GDP per capita
Not to sound like an Islamophobe, but outside of strict adherents to Islam, which immigrant groups don't "want" to assimilate to a sufficient degree for your tastes? I understand that much of Europe receives primarily Muslim migrants and that those immigrants can be seen as culturally incompatible. But my take is that, given the overwhelming appeal of migrating to wealthy nations, it should be possible to design system that deters the most staunchly conservative/religious migrants in favor of people more compatible with Western norms.
I'd imagine this is not done explicitly at least in part due to the Western compulsion to not appear/act in ways that are discriminatory towards religious beliefs. But as an American, I have seen too many thousands of up close examples of 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants (and beyond) who may look Filipino or Lebanese or Mexican or Pakistani but are in every way as American as the average American of Anglo/German/French/etc ancestry.
> most staunchly conservative/religious migrants in favor of
That was my first thought as well, but it turns out that an interesting quirk of being an expat in a country with a different religion is that most such groups will essentially "double down" on their own belief. Essentially back at their home country they felt comfortable with a minimal, token faith because they were immersed in it anyway, but away from it they feel their ethnic identity "under attack" and hence they cling more strongly to certain aspects of it.
There's the opposite trend too, wherein the risk-takers who are willing to uproot themselves from their traditional societies and forge new lives in a new world are not particularly devoted to tradition.
And even when they are, there's the secondary trend where their children have little connection to that old world and are enamored by the new one they've grown up in.
The big exception I see to this is among asylum groups who start new lives not for ambition or adventure or hope, but out of fear and necessity, sometimes entirely against their will.
And though my Western guilt hates to restate it, the assimilation-adverse trend seems to be strongest among strict adherents to Islam.
I’d suggest extrapolating a bit. It’s not an issue with Muslims, it’s an issue with strict adherence to a religious code.
Visit Williamsburg in New York or rural Pennsylvania and you’ll find other religions that are painfully incapable of integrating (Orthodox Jews and the Amish, respectively).
Absolutely, and that's why I'm worried about sounding like an Islamophobe and not being one. The issue is obviously (to me) one of strict religious orthodoxy, not specific religious affiliation. The problem being that there is only a single major immigrant group with strict religious orthodoxy and it happens to be Muslim. If Amish or Mormon fundamentalists were immigrating to my country in large numbers I would have the exact same concern.
There are other large immigrant groups that arent Muslim and also have issues integrating. Also, many Muslim immigrants have varying degrees of orthodoxy.
I’d say another part of the problem lies with the fact that Europeans tend to be pretty racist and insular group (and definitely so when compared to how they envision themselves). They complain about everything from Roma to West Africans (many of whom are not Muslim) moving to their countries. Hell, the Portuguese complain about Brazilians moving to their country and stealing their language with their slang.
Of course it’s all relative. Europeans are most definitely more welcoming than say the Japanese.
Isn't disliking outsiders a bit natural, specially if you are absolutely not adopting to the culture? And is this dislikeness same as racism or are these two different behaviours?
(saying this while working as an outsider in another country where at least with coworkers I never feel like an outsider but may be that's this industry I work in)
>Like most systems of thought Racism draws from some common characteristic(s) found in at least part of the humanity for its power, in the case of Racism it is the tendency to xenophobia.
not liking outsiders is xenophobia, most European countries are xenophobic, but often that xenophobia gets handled, explained and solved via the tools of Racism.
That's actually an indictment of society, and not individuals' choices to avoid having children. If society can't manage to not exponentially explode forever, maybe it behooves us to rethink our approach to society.
Their middle-aged and elderly are still alive and there aren't nearly enough children to replace them. Their coming collapse is already visible when you look at an age breakdown (assuming they don't open up to immigration or have a baby boom very soon), even though the contraction in the population overall is currently small.
You're saying "collapse" as if it's something bad.
The thing with exponential growth, is that it has to stop at some point. The near future is not a bad time for that. There's no food insecurity, and the basic needs can be met with a small fraction of the population.
That assumes that you don't take adults from countries that you destroy.
Something the US has been real good at since WII.
Incidentally if you have never wondered if ceos who have seen the wrong end of a NATO missile will particularly care if native US citizen live or die, well you probably should.
I'm sure you don't mean it this way but the "immigrants who don't assimilate" is both ahistorical and a (typically) white nativist talking point.
It's ahistorical in the sense that what population hasn't immersed after 2-3 generations? They're indistinguishable from any other American. As just one example, over half of CBP officers are Latino/Hispanic [1].
Plus, assimilate into what? Culture isn't static. What is US culture now is different than 40 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago. When people (and again, to be clear, I mean generally not you specifically) they're clinging onto a flawed picture of what culture was or should be that was never really the case or, at best, was only the case for a very narrow window.
A prime example in online spaces is fetishizing the 1950s and it's hardly ever mentioned that women couldn't get certain jobs, what jobs they could get were severely underpaid compared to their male counterparts, the idyllic life was only possible because of a permanent underclass of lowly paid workers and the top marginal tax rate was 91%.
This is a deep topic. But "culture" is often used nowadays as a more polite label for "Islamophobia" and/or "racism". I would encourage you to look at who, politically, bangs that particular drum (eg AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France) and really consider the whole platform they're pushing, who it's for and why.
