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If it was a farm/care home/building site etc it would also say a lot about how we train and value people
Total Fertility Rates have been plummeting worldwide since 2019 and it looks like the UK will reach peak population much sooner than UN forecasts suggest:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
It will soon become obvious that immigration is absolutely needed if we intend to carry on the insane Growth Goose Chase.
Insane and self destructive growth chase indeed …
The core issues are:
Pro-natalism is still an essential part of growth economics. If we accept GDP growth as an essential, then by default we accept pro-natalism, with all its assumptions and consequences – many of which are negative for child bearing age women.
This is set out here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/04/making-more-babies-to-drive-economic-growth/
Immigration does not actually solve resource management or distribution problems at all.
Firstly, immigrants bring their dependents, being predominantly in the reproductive age group, and will then actually increase the dependency ratio we are actually seeking to reduce.
Hence immigration can easily become counterproductive.
If we see a pattern of immigration from less developed countries to more developed nations to cover the generational age bulge in the population pyramid, then we must accept their resource consumption per capita will then increase to match our own, further adding to the overall global overshoot in resource consumption.
The industrialised group of nations who might wish to use immigration to balance out any increases in dependency ratios from ageing populations are vastly higher resource consumers than the potential sources of immigrants.
Your average Norwegian uses over 450 times more energy a year than your average citizen of Niger.
Anyone arguing this is sustainable, even in the short term, when climate change measures are already far short of the required targets, is barking.
The argument used by degrowth advocates is that ageing populations less represent a fiscal problem, than a productivity problem. This may well require some kind of balancing economic growth, but genuinely useful economic growth must involve higher productivity to sustain and/or increase tax takes from the employed population. Hence we probably need to look at improving investment ratios as a top priority, and especially productivity in the sectors of labour shortages. Increasing wages might help too..
Given UK’s flatlining, even falling, real wages where are the incentives ? The BoE is actually strangling the economy with its anti worker high interest rate policies
Incidentally, the UK definitely needs to separate out the administration of seasonal labour requirements from permanent immigration procedures, and streamline these. These seasonal peaks are predictable, though increasing GDP per cap in the eastern European countries we have relied upon means the UK is less attractive for seasonal employment. That means an increase in productivity becomes increasingly important in this sector too.
We already have an economic inactivity rate of c. 22% of the working age population who are neither in work nor looking for a job. That is about 9.5m people. There has been a 750k increase in the number of persons economically inactive post pandemic.
If we have a serious and increasing problem of chronic illness, then surely the sensible response to invest significantly in improved health care ? … also then seeking to increase incentives for those wishing to return to work, instead of punishing them with high marginal tax rates.
Reduction in that 22% figure will also reduce dependency ratios, though it might require new and improved forms of social care.
A genuine attempt to improve employment opportunities for disabled people, rather than the punitive system we seem to operate, would also be beneficial.
One of the triggers in the immigration debate is pressure on housing.
A reduction in the 22% of the economically inactive will not tend to increase pressures on the already struggling housing market, and this is another advantage over immigration.
What about Kane
It is an Irish name
He is from an immigrant family
And please don’t imply you think the Irish are English