3) Immigration in the third millenium – The demographic brainteaser

Immigration and demography are an intricate skein of problems difficult to disentangle and in which is not even easy to find one’s bearings. A brainteaser that was born from the original sin of the coarse blunder of reverend Malthus at the end of ‘700: population is necessarily limited by the amount of bread and butter available; when it is not limited by effective restraints, population increases when sustenance increase; these restraints and those that repress the largest capacity of development of the population and keep the effects within the sustenance limits, they are all reduced to the moral control, to the vice and misery.
Things, as we know went in a different way: Malthus was wrong. “Technological post-war period development, in fact, allowed for the availability of food, but possibly for the lack of money to buy it […]. With the spread of wealth, I think mainly of China and India, the best contraceptive ever is spreading […]. The young couples of Beijing and Shanghai that want to live comfortably and have children later, are already got started: they are lowering the average fertility of China”.(1)
So, the best contraceptive ever is the per capita income that is on the increase. With the slow but unstoppable globalization of growth, it is imagine that by the half of the century the fertility rate of the planet will reach the replacement threshold. In that case, in 292 years, the earth population might reach 9 billions, that is the same level of 2050. In the lowest of the hypothesis, with a difference of a quarter of a baby, the population would reach 2,3 billions, more or less the post-war period level. Today the birth rate is low but the death rate is very low. According to many researchers “non-mortality” is the main responsible for the unprecedented changes, that in few decades have cleared the thousand-year relationship between age groups and generations.
Charles C. Mann in a wonderful article entitled “The coming death shortage” has faced up to this problem and analysing the statistics of the last decades has sentenced: “We are in presence of a massive death deferral” (2).
Almost a flip into the rules that from time immemorial have ruled the intergenerational change. So, one should not get surprised that the one of the elderly is the strongest “object of desire” of whom is competing for a bunch of votes.
Contrary to what has happened for centuries, when, on the basis of a rule similar to the one that governs the movement of celestial bodies, every 25 years the youngest generation used to take over and replace the previous one, today is no longer the case. And in the future this alternation will be even scanter. More and more conspicuous crowds of elderly, that dazzled by the mirage of a possible quasi-eternity, will be less prone to transfer to their children and grandchildren the power they hold tight in their hands. Will the elderly be the owner of the future?
A demographic oxymoron that is very likely to become real given the fact that, as the American economist Kenneth Boulding had already twigged in 1965: “It is the propensity of the old, rich, and powerful to die that gives the young, poor, and powerless hope.”

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1) cfr. intervista di Hania Zlotnik, Il Sole24Ore, 23 luglio 2008.
2) Charles C. Mann, The coming death shortage, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 2005.

See Also:

1) Immigration in the third millenium

2) Immigration in the third millennium – the economy of remittances