Immigration/Population thread
Obvious, really.
By any measure, the net migration figures for last year are unprecedented.
Clearly this didn't happen by accident and was part of a strategy to reduce inflation, which seems to have worked, or at least, not not worked, albeit with other costs.
Visa rules were tightened before the July election and subsequently the new government have just adopted these without change.
The Migration Observatory expects numbers to fall naturally anyway, allowing the government to meet its pledge without having to change much else.
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition
Comments
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Some other background info.
UK population since 1871.
Fertility rate.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Thank goodness for boomers, I say. Without them, the UK would have needed higher immigration much sooner.
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You should have added the life expectancy graphs too:
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Good point. Interesting observation that life expectancy appears to have more or less topped out.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
The fertility rate drop since 2010 is a bit alarming. My youngest kid's year has only 48 out of 60 children. It's the same across the borough with a number of classes closing.
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Does feel odd when my eldest (now 15) had an extra class added to her year.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
If it was a one off blip, it would be great, but I think it has got even worse, so schools are going to close. Nowhere in the western world has solved the problem either.
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My 8 year old's school has gone from 2 classes per year down to 1 due to lack of demand (doesn't stop the local Facebook nimbys claiming that a proposed small housing development is going to overwhelm the local schools though)
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Not necessarily a problem overall, reducing population will also reduce human ecological impact, how we manage the change of reducing size of available workforce will be the big challenge.
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It depends how easy it is to reopen the class I suppose. A couple of years ago the council closed a load of nurseries due to the lack of children. They didn't seem to consider the possibility that there might be more in the future (or a change in government funding), so all the closures are permanent.
Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world along with the highest life expectancy for women. They talk about what a disaster it is and how the country is dying, and then do nothing about it.
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It's why it makes sense for countries with low birth rate to allow immigration from parts of the world with excess birth rate to balance the population. The problem then is obviously that the developed nations get their pick and the developing nations get a brain drain. Maybe the solution is to wrk to improve educatin in developing countries so there's enough people to go around. At the other end, not spending a fortune on health care to extend existence by a few years might help.
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"At the other end, not spending a fortune on health care to extend existence by a few years might help."
The West seems to be starting down this road with assisted dying. I think I read not long ago that 20% of deaths in Canada are now assisted.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
The latter is quite a Modest Proposal, even if quite a difficult sell.
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It doesn't even need that, just not being artificially kept alive for a bit longer (often with little quality of life).
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Yeahbut assisted dying precludes the being artificially kept alive with a low quality of life part.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
I’d imagine forecasting immigration is an exceptionally difficult task, but climate change will certainly become a huge factor in the not too distant future. Some models are forecasting 3 billion displaced people, on the move, looking for habitable zones to live in by 2100. Some say (worst case) 1 billion as soon as 2050.
I’m not stating these figures as being correct, but feel there’s an inevitability that mass movement of climate refugees is coming, and we happen to live in a habitable zone.
Worrying about fertility rates will become academic as the world’s population will be squeezed into ever smaller habitable regions, with high population density.
Living on a finite planet, I’m surprised that continual growth is promoted as something good, when land and resources are dwindling. Relying on mining asteroids and moving to an already dead planet (Mars) isn’t something I'm buying into.
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My understanding of the fertility rate concern isn't that people are promoting endless growth, it's that there is concern that it's falling below replacement rate. Population decrease doesn't seem fun.
Many of the ideas that I have around reversing low birth rates do seem to have been tried somewhere in the western world, and don't seem to have actually worked though.
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I'm doing a few sorting shifts down a at the Royal Mail this Christmas and the majority of the casuals are people of pensionable age trying to mitigate their inadequate pension provision. Think this, along with the likely reduction in lifespan, might shore up some of the labour shortfall.
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Cake is just weakness entering the body0 -
I am quite enjoying this weird mix of being worried about population decrease while being filled by immigrants.
Is it just numbers, or something else?
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Yebbut, they're not from round these parts, are they?
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It's been below the replacement rate for a long time, but it has fallen a lot recently. Presumably a general feeling of being poor puts people off from having kids.
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This is why prolonging life at the other end whilst also expecting retirement ages to remain as they are because 'that's how it's always been and it's not fair if I have to work longer' needs resolving.
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I think it's fair to be concerned by a falling birth rate and also by aspects of mass immigration.
I think it's a very simplified view that a shortfall in birth rate can simply be made up by immigration from different countries with no issues. At the same time I suspect any issues from current immigration are probably less severe than the issues we'd see with no immigration...
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What I found funny was the use of the term "population decrease".
Falling birth rates is another issue.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0
