The birthrate shredder

Any civilization that denies immigration — and I don't just mean "selective amounts of immigration from preferred, equally rich countries", but essentially full open borders immigration, particularly from developing countries — is going to literally die.

This is not some wishy-washy, politically correct argument based on how "important" racial diversity is for a variety of perspectives; nor is it merely a concern that we might miss out on a one-in-a-million genius. Rejecting open-borders immigration essentially guarantees a completely unavoidable, teleological demographic and eventually civilizational collapse. It is an accelerating asymptotic process that locks on to civilizational annihilation.

The reason for this is simple, and it's one countries as diverse as China, France, and Japan are facing right now. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

As a nation gets wealthier and more educated — as GDP per capita and educational attainment increase — its birth rate inevitably declines. While we don't fully understand all the nuanced sociological, economic, and cultural reasons for this, it is an observable pattern across time and across a vastly different number of countries and cultures.

There are a number of reasons for this: one, the richer and more educated a population is, the busier they become engaging in their careers, educating themselves, and actually enjoying the fruits of that wealth through travel, personal projects, and self-fulfillment. The insane time and wealth investment of having children, which can temporarily or even permanently grind your entire life to a halt and redirects your focus from attainment and enjoyment towards the well-being of others, becomes a stark contrast to a life of personal freedom.

Then, at the same time, the traditional incentives towards having children essentially evaporate. You no longer need kids to support you in old age, as personal savings and the general social safety net take over that role. You don't need children to supplement your household income because a high GDP per capita means one or two incomes are enough to maintain a household. You also don't require the extra labor around the house that children used to provide on a family farm, because we actually have services and automation to handle that.

Furthermore, as people become wealthier and more educated, they tend to move into more urban areas where the amount of available living space decreases, meaning you simply don't have the space for children to naturally play and grow.

But perhaps the most complex and powerful driver of this decline is the skyrocketing cost of competitive child-rearing. The more rich and educated everyone else is, the more resources parents need to invest in each child. As a result, people start having fewer kids in order to gain a competitive advantage by focusing their resources more on the children they do have. Then everyone else starts being forced to have fewer children because they know that their resources would be spread entirely too thin between them. Then, because everyone else in society is doing this — and has the wealth to back it up — the baseline requirements for a child to succeed become incredibly demanding. As a result, you enter a spiral of helping your children keep up with everyone else's children becoming more and more expensive and so people having fewer and fewer children until you reach a point where those who feel like they couldn't keep up in the amount of resources they could allocate towards their children start to not want to have any at all.

There is no natural stopping point to this decline because it is essentially a collective action problem. Everyone is making the individual decision for themselves, and you cannot force an entire population to simply even out and increase how many children they are having.

Some argue that government intervention can fix this through positive financial incentives, but if you look at countries that implement indefinite paid maternal and paternal leave, free childcare, and family-friendly infrastructure — like in Scandinavia —, while their birthrates are not as bad as somewhere like South Korea (at 0.72) or Japan (1.2), you see the exact same decline in their birth rates overall: Sweden is at 1.52, below the replacement rate of 2.10, even below that of the US at 1.62 (which is mostly propped up by first and second generation immigrants as it is — if we just counted white people, it would be 1.51) and far below the birth rate of, e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa at 4.60.

When incentives fail, authoritarian regimes often pivot to restrictive pro-natalist policies, such as banning birth control and abortion, or even attempting to force people to have children. These policies are not just profoundly unethical; they are entirely unworkable.

If a government bans birth control and abortion, citizens are forced to weigh two options: endure the massive, life-altering costs of raising a child, or completely avoid having one. People will overwhelmingly choose the latter, either acquiring contraceptives through illegitimate means, or simply stopping having sex altogether. You can see this exact resistance playing out in real-time with the 4B movement in South Korea, where women are engaging in a massive reproductive strike; more broadly, that kind of environment is certainly a factor in what has led South Korea to have one of the lowest birth rates (0.72) in the world.

Attempting to directly force people to give birth is an even greater administrative nightmare. If an authoritarian state wants to forcibly prevent births, like China did during the One Child Policy, they can abduct pregnant women, force an abortion, and sterilize them in a single, brutal intervention. As horrible as it is, it's relatively practical if a state is motivated enough; it's a "one and done" atrocity, and the state never has to pay attention to them again.

But if a state wants to force a woman to give birth for them, the logistical burden is astronomical. The state must continuously surveil her for the entire nine months of her pregnancy to ensure she doesn't terminate it, and then surveil her for years afterward to ensure she actually feeds and cares for the child. If the state takes the child away immediately after birth to raise it themselves, who is going to feed, clothe, and raise that child? Maintaining a massive network to raise a generation of forcibly born children is a fuck ton of work, and it is entirely unsustainable, because where are you going to get women willing to do it who are actually lactating just for one example? I realize this is crude and cold, but this is the reason even China isn't attempting it. Evil at this scale isn't just wrong because of moral reasons, it's also usually fundamentally completely impractical and unworkable, and it's worth pointing that out from time to time because otherwise it becomes easy for people to justify the evil of an atrocity by pointing to some imagined state where it works.

Even if resistance to state banning of birth control, or state-mandated forced birth, succeed: you'll end up with a situation like Romania's Decree 770 under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. While the decree did lead to a temporarily massive spike in births the year after (1967), it also led to maternal mortality skyrocketing because women restorted to unsafe illegal abortions, and ultimately the state couldn't care for those children: after the regieme fell in 1989, it was discovered that to hundreds of thousands of children were living in horrific underfunded state orphanages, because their parents had abandoned them, because those parents had been forced to have children they didn't want. This didn't help Romania; if anything, it strained their entire social fabric even more.

Now, why is this inevitable birth rate decline a problem?

Well, once a birth rate falls below replacement level, a population is locked into economic shrinkage over time. As your population decreases, your economy shrinks because you simply have fewer people doing all the things you need — from service work and construction to research and programming. Increased productivity due to current automation simply cannot outpace an inevitable decline in population, not least because you actually need people to research, develop, manufacture, and put into place all of your increasing automation. If your economy slows down overall, your ability to actually come up with and put into practice any automation is going to slow down as well. It's a negative feedback loop; even before you reach total civilizational collapse, you face horrible recessions, depressions, and an aging, deflating economy like we currently see in Japan.

This leads to a severe crisis even before you just reach two few people to sustain your economy to any degree, however: since each generation is smaller than the last, as each previous generation ages up to retirement, and each next generation ages into becoming working age, you end up with a smaller and smaller working-age generation struggling to support a massive retired society that is completely dependent on them and only growing.

You either keep raising taxes more and more — which hurts the growth of the economy, makes it harder for young people to survive, and causes them to have even fewer children in a further negative feedback loop — or you don't raise taxes, and you simply go bankrupt and can no longer take care of your retired population. This is the exact problem that France and other Western countries are facing right now, which is leading to massive riots. You can raise retirement age but that's only a stopgap because eventually like the pattern will just continue. It will just happen slower because it will take longer for people to age into retirement. And ultimately that's a bad solution because people are going to live longer and longer and the increase in life spans due to more advanced medical technology and greater automation is going to outpace how fast political systems can keep up.

This is exactly why immigration is vital, and why open borders act as a perfectly calibrated, naturally balancing demographic lifeline. Developing countries automatically have a much higher birth rate than developed countries, and the people living there have an inherent incentive to immigrate to developed nations for better opportunity, wealth, and education. You don't even need to actively encourage them to come; the discrepancy in opportunity creates a built-in incentive structure. Critically, this natural flow filters for exactly the demographic a dying economy desperately needs: an influx of fresh, working-age people. Why? Because working-age people are the ones who actually possess the ambition, the time, the energy, and the physical mobility required to uproot their lives and make the massive journey to a new country. It naturally aligns to keep your nation alive.

You see these exact same patterns threatening the US, but the primary thing propping the US up is immigration: according to https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/new-census-reflects-growing-us-population-diversity-children-forefront, between 2010 and 2020, the non-Hispanic white population in the US actually declined by 2.6%; meanwhile, the Hispanic or Latino population grew by 23% and the Asian population grew by 35.5%; without these specific groups — and the immigration pipelines associated with them — the US would already be entering Japan-style demographic contraction, instead of the overall population growing by 7.4%. Hell, as of 2023, non-Hispanic white births officially counted for less than 50% of all births in the US, despite making up 56% of the population.

If you break down the data more, the numbers get even starker. According to The Center for Immigration Studies, in 2023, the birth rate of native-born women in the US was 1.73, whereas it was 2.19 for immigrants. Literally, the only people having babies even once they're here at or above replacement rate is immigrants. It's not about race like Elon Musk would have you believe, either: as CIS says, "The TFR of U.S.-born Hispanics is 1.81; it is 1.53 for Asians, 1.65 for blacks, and 1.75 for whites." Whites don't have a uniquely low birthrates that need to be bolstered, in other words, and other US born races have similarly low below-replacement-rate birthrates.

It doesn't work if you try to restrict immigration, either. If you only allow immigration from other developed nations (for whatever stupid racist reasons you want to list) you are pulling from a pool of places that share your exact same falling, limited population pool. You are just pulling from a slightly broader pool that is still shrinking, instead of the growing pool of ambitious, smart, motivated people who are actually willing to move.

Furthermore, if you restrict immigration to just the already wealthy, the highly educated, or specific preferred professions, you simply won't have enough people immigrating. You need an infusion of people across all sectors. You cannot solve the problem of a shrinking population — where you have nobody to build houses, nobody to take care of the elderly, nobody to do service jobs or construction — by just hiring a bunch of doctors. Those doctors are not going to clean the toilets or pour the concrete. You need the whole spectrum of labor to keep an economy functioning.

Of course, the question arises: eventually, the developing countries will become developed too. We cannot rely on them being developing forever, and we shouldn't want to, because that just incentivizes more colonialism and holding those countries down. India is up and coming right now, but eventually, we will run out of humans globally.

The answer to what we do then is, really, fuck, I don't know.

We are essentially in a race to outpace population collapse with automation. We are seeing the beginnings of this with humanoid robots learning physical tasks through reinforcement learning, and AI augmenting or replacing sectors of the knowledge economy.

China is making a massive, extreme bet on automating the fuck out of everything to survive their own demographic crunch:

China took third place in 2023, surpassing Germany and Japan. The country's push to the use of automation technology results in a high robot density of 470 robots per 10,000 employees (2022: 402 units). China only entered the top 10 in 2019. It has managed to double its robot density within four years. — International Federation of Robotics: Global Robot Density in Factories Doubled in Seven Years

China is by far the world’s largest market in 2024, representing 54% of global deployments. The latest figures show that 295,000 industrial robots have been installed - the highest annual total on record. For the first time, Chinese manufacturers have sold more than foreign suppliers in their home country. Their domestic market share limbed to 57% last year, up from about 28% over the past decade. — International Federation of Robotics: Global Robot Demand in Factories Doubles Over 10 Years

China's industrial robotics sector has surged ahead in recent years, cementing its position as the global leader in both the installation and operational stock of industrial robots. According to the latest World Robotics report published by the International Federation of Robotics, China accounted for 54 percent of all new robot installations worldwide in 2024, with a record of 295,000 units installed. As our chart shows, this represents more than double the number installed by Japan, the United States, South Korea and Germany combined (almost 140,000 installations together), which are the other four robotic powers in the world.

This brings China's operational stock of industrial robots to over 2 million, representing nearly half of the global stock (4.66 million units in 2024). Compared to the second in the ranking, Japan (around 450,000 units in 2024), the Chinese industry now has more than four times as many robots. — Statista: Operational Stock and New Installations of Industrial Robots by Country

We should watch carefully how that turns out for them because they are essentially a glimpse into the future if automation doesn't outpace demographic collapse.

Eventually, we will reach a birth rate shredder (see also: Gender and IQ shredders — not that I agree with either, to be clear) situation, and we just have to hope that a technological singularity takes off before we collapse. We will need to bequeath our society to a successor species — whether that is machines, immortal post-humans, or a society that has figured out how to stabilize birth rates using highly automated systems like artificial wombs and advanced IVF.

But that is a concern for a hundred years from now. In the meantime, the only way to keep the machine running and keep ourselves alive is to allow immigration. Policies that aggressively target and deport immigrants—like what is currently happening with ICE in the US — are not just morally bankrupt and fascist; they are economically suicidal. Kicking out the very people who build your houses, clean your toilets, and eventually become the professionals your society relies on is laying complete waste to the foundation of the nation itself, including the wealth of the very people demanding the deportations.