In Finland today, around 54,000 kids started their first day of school in the first grade. Four years ago, that number was around 60,000. That is a ten percent drop in four years, and because the birthrate in the country is decreasing, each year, that number starting first grade is going to drop further.
The only reason many countries are able to increase their population, is through immigration. Putting the cultural conversation about the challenges with integration and the like aside, the reason countries need immigrants is because there aren't enough people willing and able to do certain jobs. This has happened for many reasons that we needn't go into here, but suffice to say, the governments have severely mismanaged the "system" because they have tried to balance it, rather than letting market forces dictate the terms. This means that there are a lot of imbalances due to the manipulation looking for particular outcomes.
However, what needs to be thought about is the declining birthrates, and why that is happening. There are several influencing factors in this, with "economic" being often cited as the main one, but I believe it is more cultural, in the sense that people want to have more freedom for themselves, to be more selfish, not have as much obligation. However, not having enough money is also a legitimate excuse, however this creates another problem for the countries taking immigrants, because it is a stop-gap measure.
If money is an issue that holds people back from having children, for a country like Finland, taking in immigrants is not going to fix the issue, because most immigrants who come into the country are going to have les earning potential than the people born here, due to language and cultural factors. This means that those who come into the country aren't going to be able to afford to have more children anyway, which means not only are there more people coming in to put stress on the system, they aren't going to increase the internal birthrate, because they can't afford to.
So, what ends up happening is more stress on an already stressed economy, and then as things get increasingly worse, the citizens are not only suffering financially, but also feel that they are getting replaced in their own country, which technically, they are. Because if immigration is the only way the country is growing, it means that there are more immigrants coming in than there are local children being born, regardless of the background of those children's parents.
Is this a problem?
It depends on what you think a problem is, right? If you think that culture being changed by immigration is a problem, then yes, it is a problem, even though *even without immigration cultures will inevitably change. Cultures have to change in order for the people who fill them to adapt and survive in a changing world. However, immigration is likely going to change it faster, as well as in ways that are not necessarily forced by the environment - like the Christians replacing paganism throughout Scandinavia and the Nordics.
Is this the real problem?
Depends on perspective. However, in my opinion, the real problem is that again, this process is engineered by centralized forces looking to control the system, and just like the inevitability of change, centralized decision-making will fail. All decisions fail eventually, as they are replaced and superseded by better decisions, but centralized decisions are made for everyone involved without it being a good fit for the vast majority of the group. This means that when centralization fails, it fails spectacularly.
The only thing we can really count on is that eventually, all centralized control structures are going to fail, it is just a matter of time. However, since we have limited lifespans, we can't really afford just to wait for the current crop of authority to collapse and be replaced by the next that swoops in and fills the void, because we will likely be waiting multiple lifetimes.
Have you ever thought what a healthy culture is?
I can't answer with certainty, but I think that a healthy culture is one that is able to continuously improve, which means more than just make more money. A healthy culture is about the people within it and what is best for them as individuals, as families, as communities and as a collection of strangers. But because of the variation in all things important to us, no centralized rulemaking is ever going to be able to build a healthy culture, especially because it ends up taking the low-hanging fruit options, which is to maximize and protect itself.
The irony of governments is that while they say and do what they can to protect themselves, if what they did was their job, they would be protected. In my opinion, a government's job is pretty simple - to improve the wellbeing of citizens. But, to do that has a lot of complication and complexity. Complication can have rules developed for it once the complications are known and the tools are available, but the complexity will always generate a dynamic environment that is unsolvable.
Unsolvable doesn't mean conditions can't improve.
Working out how to improve conditions for humanity should be the number one goal of society. However, because we are more interested in satisfying our desires than anything else, the economy is driven by the goods and services that entertain us, not what improves us as a collective species. This means that what gets supplied, is what makes money, rather than what generates value and opportunity. This includes all the consumer goods and services, but also the government goods and services, like military, which is there to protect our interests - with "interests" being what makes money.
I think a lot of people look at immigration from a cultural perspective, when in actual fact, it is an economic situation. In a healthy society, immigration isn't an issue, because people would move freely to places where they have opportunity to best provide value to the society. However, due to the imbalances created by authorities in order to control populations, we can't have healthy societies where people have adequate opportunities to grow, learn, work and build and raise a family. And because of the imbalances created, the governments try to plug their poorly designed economic ecosystem with immigration, exacerbating and magnifying all kinds of problems that they have created by meddling in the first place.
Immigration is not a solution, but it is also probably the only way that many countries are going to be able to balance their economy in the mid-term. Long-term however, people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that if they want to maintain their current way of life, they are going to have to change their current way of life.
See the problem?
Balance using the system currently employed is never going to work, because the system is designed for imbalance, because it is very much skewed to favor the few who control it. Rather than it giving them more control so they can better manage, it gives them more control so they can fail bigger.
And eventually, they all do.
There are many lessons to learn, but fewer people paying attention in class.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]