The population of the world is shrinking – except for Africa. The wealthiest countries of the world all are failing to replace themselves. That is, in places like China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, and Thailand, fertility rates have fallen below 2.1, the replacement rate. That means that those countries (and many others) are doomed inexorably to experience falling birth rates and diminishing numbers of people. Only welcoming the immigration of outsiders can help to keep overall inhabitant nations remedy increasingly large labor shortages. Only Canada welcomes newcomers with open arms.
Africa is the exception to this demographic demise. Its people numbers are increasing rapidly. Its current 1.4 billion people is expected to double by 2050 and keep exploding, at least until 2070. Moreover, as populations swell dramatically, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, so joblessness and a tendency to migrate for economic reasons will propel millions of otherwise unemployed skilled and unskilled workers out of Africa to Europe and, conceivably to places now hostile to such job seekers, like Japan and South Korea.
The return of the colonized is understood best by disparities in median ages now and for the next few decades. The median age of much of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa is now about 18 years of age, moving very gradually over the next four decades to the mid- or higher 20s. In contrast, the median ages of most European countries are already above 40 and trending higher and higher. That means that instead of the broad-based pyramid of age distribution that Africa shows, the corresponding European figure is inverted. Unless Europe (and China, Japan, and South Korea) embrace immigration from Africa and Indonesia, which will for half a century have surplus labor and surplus talent, there will be too few young people of working age to support the massive elderly overhang in those fast-maturing places. Productivity will fall, entrepreneurialism will suffer, the need for social services will rise, and the shrinking societies will have to fund and care for their aging populations in innovative ways.
Africa’s educational and training deficits, that even in Nigeria and South Africa deter the kinds of economic and social advances that these and other African countries need and their growing middle classes demand, will now affect the people-short countries that need new recruits and welcome at least the talented. Ghanaian nurses are moving to Britain, along with Zimbabwean midwives; the British National Health Service needs their help. The United States and much of Europe already relies on immigrants for home care and domestic assistance; those requirements can but grow. However, Africa will be unable to supply the engineers and computer scientists that the European economy lacks, often because the colonists never focused on technical education for their subjects and, in Africa, even today only Mauritius promotes science and technological learning above all else.
What Africa will supply, if the developed world allows it, is a cadre of young migrants prepared to work hard and enhance their skills – to the ultimate benefit of countries with declining numbers of young people (few births) and to the clear benefit of Africans who will find fewer and few opportunities for profitable employment in their own countries as the total number of their compatriots increases and they all compete for the few jobs that are being created. A stark reality is that for fifty years no net new jobs have been created in South Africa.
When a population grows faster than new jobs in the formal sector, young people must either try to survive informally (turning to various hustles and to crime) or leave for more potentially advantageous places.
In the Americas, we see that massive movement for economic betterment daily among the Haitians, Venezuelans, Central Americans, and Mexicans who seek legal and illegal entry into the United States. From the Middle East and North Africa there are thousands daily attempting perilous voyages across the Mediterranean Sea or across land borders closed to them. The Old World more and more actually needs the muscle and mental abilities of immigrants, but shuns them for obvious political reasons driven by xenophobic entropy.
The rich world’s demographic dilemma can be seen most fully in South Korea, where the replacement rate has fallen below 1.0 to 0.8. In Japan and Italy the slump in births per woman has been almost as dramatic; median ages in both of those last countries approach 50. Thailand’s replacement rate is only 1.3, Brazil’s 1.6. Even India, the most populous nation across the planet, is not replacing itself. So, it, too, will shrink and its median age will rise. China, which is now numerically smaller than India, has fewer births per woman than India and will almost certainly slim in size continuously. (The official one-child policy was a demographic disaster, and, despite governmental incentives and entreaties, Chinese women no longer aspire to replacement sized families.)
Demographers predict that the working age population of China will compress to 180 million from 232 million (2012 to 2023) and Europeans over the same period will slip in total number from 85 million to 59 million. By 2055, China will have fewer than 100 million workers, unless President Xi Jinping and his successors decide to open Chinese doors to surplus populations elsewhere, even from Africa.
Giving cash incentives to mothers to grow the size of their families has so far proven unsuccessful. Once a demographic decline sets in, there have been rare reverses. Hence the return of the colonized, a phenomenon that has been noticed for many years but is now an acute need if mature economies are to continue to prosper and innovation is to remain important globally. Immigrants have almost always been entrepreneurial, as the history of the United States shows.
If the colonized are encouraged to flow back into the lands of the colonizers, as in Europe and Japan, the energy of the world need not be stilled. This could be Africa and Southeast Asia’s opportunity to contribute meaningfully to better and more productive outcomes for the world. The developing world can rescue its aging former colonial homelands.
Interesting
Ah, how short-sighted we human creatures are and have always been! It is an ALMOST Sisyphean task to push back against the weight of prejudice and fear. But, I think, the key word is "almost." We can create better immigration policies here in the US -- and help lead others by example; and we can recapture the spirit (which flourished only a few decades ago) of helping people in countries whom we helped exploit in the past.