The rhetoric of the ‘dangers of immigration’ may fetch votes. Still, the growing importance of legal and planned immigration for a country’s economic development can hardly be overestimated, and incoming President Donald Trump will likely face this dilemma when he begins his second term in office on January 20.
As it is, Trump’s MAGA team has already started the debate on the issue with his principal advisor and Tech-billionaire Elon Musk on the one side and hardliner immigration- restrictionists on the other.
However, what the U.S. is facing or will face is not unique. The world as a whole, particularly the developed world, is debating the phenomenon of aging populations in what is increasingly becoming an era of “depopulation.”
The world needs skilled personnel, whose number is limited. Therefore, they are and will be in demand, and some countries will encourage them to emigrate. Something New Zealand did last weekend by lowering the visa restrictions so that competent workers can find employment more easily.
According to a recent estimate, the global working-age population is set to decline sharply after 2070. In 2023, just 20% of China’s population was in the current retirement bracket of 60 and over. By 2100, it will be over 52% of China’s population.
The challenge is also very pronounced in much of Europe. In 2022, the EU’s working-age population accounted for approximately 64% of the total population. This share is projected to decline to approximately 54.4% by 2100.
The projected change in the working-age population by 2100 among the G7 group of nations varies widely, with Canada (+18%) and the United States (+8%) in the positive, and the UK (-5%), France (-8%), Germany (-27%), Japan (-46%) and Italy (-52%) in the negative.
If Canada and the U.S. are in the positive zone at the moment, it is, as we will see, by attracting young migrant workers, a phenomenon that is now facing increasing challenges.
As political scientist Nicholas Eberstadt points out in his essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, with birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation that will eventually encompass the whole planet.
“Future government policy, regardless of its ambition, will not stave off depopulation. The shrinking of the world’s population is all but inevitable. Societies will have fewer workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators—and more people dependent on care and assistance.”
Apparently, the world’s average childbearing level is heading downward consistently. With the exception of the region of sub-Saharan Africa, every country is witnessing this decline. According to the UN Population Division (UNPD), the total fertility rate for the planet was only half as high in 2015 as it was in 1965. Most of the world’s people live in countries with below-replacement fertility levels, patterns inherently incapable of sustaining long-term population stability.
In affluent countries, a total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is needed for the replacement. This level may be somewhat higher in countries with lower life expectancy.
According to the UNPD, by 2022, every major population in East Asia —China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—was shrinking. By 2023, fertility levels were 40 percent below replacement in Japan, over 50 percent below replacement in China, almost 60 percent below replacement in Taiwan, and an astonishing 65 percent below replacement in South Korea.
In South Asia, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have all fallen below the replacement level, and Bangladesh is about to fall. Europe’s overall fertility rates have been continuously below replacement levels.
The United States is not immune to global trends. The U.S. birth rate is falling and continues to sink below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the total fertility rate will be 1.67 births per woman through 2024 – well below replacement.
It is against this background that analysts like Eberstadt are worried that people are not comprehending how prolonged depopulation will recast societies, economies, and power politics. It is feared that by 2050, two-thirds of people around the world could see working-age populations (people between the ages of 20 and 64) diminish in their countries. This trend stands to constrain economic potential in those countries in the absence of innovative adjustments and countermeasures.
Depopulation also has serious national security ramifications in the sense that there may not be enough people prepared to fight wars and sustain casualties in doing so. This problem has become quite apparent in the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Even otherwise, only in a few countries, the United States in particular, people are prepared to receive “body bags” from the battlefields. In China, where soldiers constitute the norm of “one-child” taking care of two families (parents and parents-in-law), the problem becomes all the more serious.
Seen comparatively, if experts believe that of all the countries, it is the U.S. that seems to be best equipped to face the challenges of depopulation, it is mainly thanks to immigration that constitutes a growing share of the rich world’s labor force, youth, and highly educated talent. Continuing inflows of skilled immigrants also give the U.S. a great advantage. They are more likely than native-born Americans to be in the prime working age, helping fill open jobs in the economy.
It may be noted here that to mitigate the impact of an aging population and the competition for young workers, nations may increasingly rely on technology and automation to fill labor gaps, transforming the workforce landscape. And here, the U.S. is in a much better position because it is considered the best “attracting center” of the world’s skilled or young technologists with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds.
A recent survey by the Economist magazine says that three big, rich, English-speaking countries are the most powerful magnets of young global talents. “If there were no barriers to entry, 23 million graduates would move to America, 17 million to Canada, and nine million to Australia, we estimate. Taking account of the number who would consider leaving these countries, global free movement for graduates would raise the number of them in the US by 7%. Canada, Australia, and Switzerland would see their graduate populations rise by a factor of around 2.5; New Zealand by over fourfold.”
That, in the process, China and India would lose the largest number of such graduates in absolute terms (14 million and 12 million respectively) is a different matter. All told, the smartest people on earth are highly mobile.
“Only 3.6% of the world’s population are migrants. But of the 1,000 people with the highest scores in the entrance exam for India’s elite institutes of technology, 36% migrate after graduation. Among the top 100, 62% do. Among the top 20% of AI researchers in the world, 42% work abroad,” according to MacroPolo, a think-tank in Chicago.
Musk argues that such talents must continue to be welcome in the U.S. under the Trump regime, given what he decries as a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in America, which is the “fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”
Incidentally, the U.S. semiconductor industry alone needs more than 160,000 engineers by 2032 if McKinsey & Company is to be believed. But Musk thinks that the number needed is double that number. For him, “the number of people in the USA who are super talented engineers and super motivated is far too low.”
Predictably, Musk’s view on legal and talented immigrants has evoked backlash from immigration restrictionists, who argue that tech companies should look to the 330 million people in America for top talent instead of calling for more foreign workers to immigrate to the U.S.
However, Musk does not seem to be convinced. His response to the immigration restrictionists is that “Of course, my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans, and we do, as that is much easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process….However, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America…If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will lose. End of story.”
It is no wonder why Musk supports Trump’s proposed appointment of Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to an advisory position for artificial intelligence (AI) in his incoming administration. Krishnan is strongly in favor of removing caps on green cards for highly-skilled workers born in foreign countries as America needs “the best, regardless of where they happen to be born.”
For Musk, Sriram “Makes sense.” But then, he and his other colleagues have to fight much harder to keep the doors of the U.S. open for legal immigration under a President who has won by promising to “SEAL THE BORDER.”
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
