Since the 1920s, the West has been built on the consensus that immigration must be limited so that migrants can be properly assimilated into society without taking away jobs from citizens. Whilst multiculturalism and mass-migration has marked the post-Second World War world, we are seeing a resurgence of anti-immigration and selective-immigration policies through means such as the American border wall with Mexico.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, the world has experienced a population explosion, posing the problem to the developed world of what to do with an ever-expanding labour pool. Labour was cheap and gravitated to wealthy developed states. The developed world, especially the United States, faced a surge of immigrants and decided to limit their entry to keep the price of labour from plunging. Indeed, this has stayed true for most of the twentieth century.
However, this will no longer be the case in the twenty-first century. Population growth is plateauing, with people living longer. The ageing population is growing exponentially while youth levels remains steady. Europe and Japan are already experiencing this problem. But this is only a minor part of this complex dilemma.
There is an assumption that while birth-rates may decline in the developed world, developing states will continue to have high birth-rates. This is simply not true. Birth-rates are declining everywhere, including developing states. Europe and Russia are going to be hit the most heavily, with the United Nations forecasting the population of Europe will decline by 100 million people by 2100. According to United Nations reports, the global population growth rate will half during the first part of the twenty-first century and will decline to 10% of the rate seen between 1950 and 2000. This shift in demographics will be integral in shaping our future.
The reasons for this decline in population is simple; the incentive for more kids is long gone. As put by STRATFOR, “Ten children in eighteenth-century France might have been a god send. Ten children in late-nineteenth century France might have been a burden. Ten children in late-twentieth-century France would be a catastrophe”. With younger generations focusing on the financial and time costs of children, the imperative for having larger families has now been blurred.
The consequences of a declining population will be immense. The economies of the western world, and indeed the entire globe have been based on the assumption that there will be more people, more things being produced, and more things being consumed, with the work force being constantly increased by an influx of young workers. By 2030, this will no longer be the case. An ageing and stagnated population will see the entire global economy shudder. There will be a shortage of workers and a bloated retiree population that will require increasing support. Developed states will be forced to rethink their entire economic and social policy.
As a short-term solution to abate the worst effects of this economic crisis, developed states will open their borders to immigrants, with some providing outright financial incentive to attract immigrants. The United States will tear down their wall and openly encourage Mexicans to move to the United States and enter the work force. Further, developed states will most likely continually raise the age of retirement in order to prevent the retiree population from expanding further. However, as the migration crisis in the European Union and rising xenophobia across the developed world has shown, this will understandably result in massive social and political polarisation that will make today’s polarisation pale in comparison.
A long-term solution that developed states will pursue will be the full automatisation of the workforce. Developed states will turn to robotics, a process we are already seeing today, in order to fully reform the economy and support the retiree population. It is likely that the workforce of the second half of the twenty-first century will be supplanted by robotic workers, which will still result in further tensions.
It is clear that if the current population forecasts are to be believed, this crisis will begin to come to a head in the 2030s. It will define the twenty-first century as the Great Depression did for the twentieth and will have far reaching consequences for the globe.
