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Jewish World Review April 11, 2000 / 6 Nissan, 5760
Ben Wattenberg
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- CONSIDER HOW JOSEPH CHAMIE, Director of the United Nation's Population Division, distills the new and very controversial U.N. publication "Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?" He looks at the current foundation of the demographic future and says, "This is the only time in history where people are living longer and populations are shrinking" -- but, he quickly notes, it doesn't apply to America. (For that, we Americans are blessed.) In short, we are looking ahead to a world where, in most of its modern parts, people will be many fewer and much older. As Casey Stengel used to say, that is a true fact. Which is why it is not a popular one in some quarters, particularly when the news is delivered by the United Nations. After all, most of the time U.N. agencies are stressing (overstated) forecasts of population growth in faraway underdeveloped countries, rather than the wrenching implications of shrinking populations in proud Europe and insular Japan. Speaking officially for all the nations of Europe, Joao Fins-do-Lago of Portugal responded to Chamie's truth-telling effrontery thusly: "The report presents a one-dimensional approach to the highly complex issue of population aging.... We would have appreciated that the document... been provided... before being presented to the press and the public.... This is an essentially distinct phenomena.... Future work must be done at a national and regional level." And so, official Europe continues in official denial. Let's call the European Union what it is: the European Ostrich. The operative and misleading word in Fins-do-Lago's statement is "distinct." The root causes of the future sharp rise of median age are not distinct at all, and everyone knows it. Longevity is expanding in most every developed country but Russia, which is in crisis. And birth rates and fertility rates have fallen sharply in every area of the world in recent decades. In Europe the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is 1.4 children per woman, about a third below the 2.1 rate required to merely "replace" a population over time. In America the TFR is 2.0. Chamie and his colleagues have capsulized the problem with the path-breaking phrase, "replacement migration." Just as a "replacement fertility" rate tells us how many babies are needed to keep a population stationary, so "replacement migration" tells us how many migrants are needed to:
1. keep population from falling; Ben Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is the moderator of PBS's "Think Tank." You may comment by clicking here.
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