Consider This from NPR - Could Migration Help Ease The World's Population Challenges?

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

While some countries are seeing their populations decline and grow older, others are growing fast. That has economic implications. Could migration help?NPR's Emily Feng reports on the long term consequences of China's shrinking population.We also hear from Lant Pritchett, research director with the think tank Labor Mobility Partnerships, about the ways in which migration could help tackle population imbalances. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. On November 15, 2022, Earth's population hit 8 billion people. That's right. Every one of these today takes humanity past 8 billion human beings. The traffic jams, the crowded trains, the crowds. If you're noticing more people everywhere, that's because there literally are. 8 billion and counting as the global population hits another milestone. It took 12 years for Earth to grow from 7 billion to 8 billion people.

And sure, there are a lot of challenges associated with population growth. Food security, for example. But on the plus side, Andrea Wonar calls the 8 billion milestone a triumph of human development. Wonar is the India representative for the UN Population Fund. The number of human beings is more than ever due to increasing life expectancy, but also declining infant and maternal mortality. So for us, that's a mark of progress in medicine and in health systems. So this is a landmark in human survival.

Many countries around the world are fueling the growth. India is one. Another is Nigeria. The United Nations projects that over the next three decades, Nigeria's population will jump from its current 200 million people to more than 375 million. That'll make Nigeria the fourth most populous country in the world, after China, India, and the United States. However, while it is true the global population continues to grow overall, the rate of growth is actually slowing down.

That is because in some parts of the world, birth rates are falling. The U.S. has recorded its lowest rate of population growth since the nation's founding. Australia's quarterly population has fallen for the first time since these records were taken in 1980s. Now or never. This is how Japan is describing its population crisis. The country is on the brink of not being able to function as a society. Both these trends, population growth in some places, falling birth rates in others, they are reshaping the world around us. For example, China has long been the most populous country on Earth.

But the United Nations says that sometime this year, India will officially take the number one spot. And as the global population shifts, there will likely be significant economic ripple effects. The fact that global population is 8 billion and is going to be 9 or 10 billion, that's not the critical issue. Jack Goldstone is a professor of public policy at George Mason University, and he writes about global population trends. I think what's important about the 8 billion is that we're going to be connected. And so we have to get used to the idea that what happens in other places will directly affect our quality of life here. Consider this. China has the world's second largest economy, but its population is shrinking now for the first time in 60 years.

That raises concerns that if the Chinese economy shrinks, so could the global economy. We'll hear more about that and then what role immigration could play in resolving the world's population imbalances. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, January 30th. P's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. China's population shrank in 2022 for the first time since the 1960s. It's a trend the Chinese government has been worried about for some time. In 2016, China relaxed its one-child policy, allowing married couples to have two children. And as of 2021, married couples can now

have three. But that does not mean people are choosing to have more children, and China's population is getting older overall. And Pierre's Emily Fang reports that all of this is expected to have serious consequences in the long term. The last time China's population shrank was in 1960, and that was because of a man-made famine under the ruling Communist Party called the Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions of people starved to death. This time, China is shrinking again, not because significantly more people are dying, but because birth rates are dropping. According to official numbers, China's birth totals have plummeted by over 40% since the year 2016. This is Nicholas Eberstadt, a senior researcher at the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute. That is a larger percentage drop than births

during the famine after Mao's Great Leap forward. We're seeing an absolutely seismic shock. That's something that usually only occurs in societies when there's a sudden convulsion from total war or an upheaval due to a terrible, terrible plague. A seismic shock because China's meteoric economic growth the last 40 years was hugely dependent on being a big, populous country with lots of young workers. That gave them a big domestic market to sell to and a pool of cheap labor that could build cities and make goods for export. But anyone who's followed demographics in China has known for at least a decade that someday China's total headcount would drop. Just not this soon. That's Dr. Yi Fuxian.

He's a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And in the last few years, he's become kind of a demography whistleblower. He believes China's own data shows the population actually started shrinking in 2018 and that the state willfully inflated its numbers by more than 100 million people. Angry at him because his predictions played into Beijing's fears that a decline in the working age population would make it hard to sustain its ambition to overtake the U.S. China's latest GDP data, announced this week on the same day, shows economic growth continues to slow, even before the full effects of its looming demographic crunch have hit.

At this point, you're probably wondering why China's birth rate has slowed so drastically. It's because of what's called an echo effect. Dr. Wang Feng is a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he explains birth rates were already falling in the 1970s, well before China imposed a one-child policy cap on all families. And now the people descended from those generations are also having fewer children, an echo from the past, though for new reasons. There is the drastic postponement of marriage among young people. That change has accompanied this vast expansion in education, higher education, urbanization, and changes in attitudes.

The state has tried to incentivize having more children, but only between married heterosexual couples. And so far, it's had no luck. Statistics announced showed birth totals dropped another 10% this past year alone. And PR's Emily Fang. Parts of the industrialized world are also facing a long-term demographic crisis. As incomes rise, birth rates fall, which leads to economic challenges associated with an older, shrinking population. Lant Pritchett is a development economist who studies labor markets and migration. The problem isn't so much that the overall population shrinks.

It's that during the period after the birth rate falls, it's something we call inverting the demographic pyramid, which instead of there being a lot more young people than old people in it, the relative populations start to shrink. And you go from having lots of people in the labor force to support the elderly to headed towards equality of people in the labor force and people in the aged population. And that just has never happened in the history of the world. And it's not clear it's a sustainable way to sustain the social contract we have in which the young support the old. At the same time, parts of the developing world have the opposite challenge. Their populations are young and booming. The 10 youngest countries in the world are all in sub-Saharan Africa.

My colleague Ari Shapiro spoke to Pritchett and asked if those countries could provide a solution to the demographic problems of industrialized nations. They definitely could and definitely would. Gallup surveyed people around the world of whether they would be willing to move to another country, and something on the order of a billion people in the world said they'd be happy to move and work in another country. So no question that there's an ample supply of workers who'd be willing to move and take up the jobs that the rich world needs and just don't have youth to take. And yet immigration is not just an economic question.

It's a political one. And political sentiment seems to be going in the opposite direction. Anti-immigrant attitudes are growing across Europe and in many parts of the highly developed world. That's true. But I think in part that's because we've traditionally forced two really high tension questions to be the same answer. One question do labor services. My feeling is if we allow those questions to be separated and we have a discussion about who are the immigrants that we want to form our future society as a separate discussion about who are we going to allow to come to our country and work. I think once those questions are separated, we can manage the

political and social consequences of migration while still meeting the very dire needs that these economies have to, you know, fill jobs that just won't otherwise be able to be filled. You're talking about something like temporary work visas. I was recently in the strawberry fields of southern Spain, which tried that kind of a program, and Spanish officials told me a lot of people skipped out and stuck around when they were supposed to have gone back at the end of harvest season. Is that inevitable? That is by no means inevitable, but it is a pressure. There's no question that once people are in a country where wages are four or five times their home country, there'll be a tendency to stay. But I think the prospects for

building a good industry that recruits, prepares, places, protects, and ensures compliance, I think we can build a good industry to do this. This is not impossible. I feel we're sort of in the position now that America was with prohibition. We wanted to ban all alcoholic beverages, and it just wasn't enforceable. And so the path to more control of alcohol was through less control of alcohol, through legalizing these flows. I feel the path to better migration is through more migration. We have to acknowledge that these economies really need these workers. And if we really need these workers, we should set up fair, transparent, legally enforced ways in which they can come and in which we can ensure reliable compliance with return if that's part of the legal agreement. Does this serve the developing world too, or is it just a brain drain where talent goes to wealthier countries with an aging population? What I'm talking about is mainly labor mobility to meet the low skill needs. If you look at the U.S. economy, over the next 10 years, the Labor Department says we're going to have 5 million jobs that don't require a college degree. And yet over that same period, we're going to have 3 million jobs that don't require a college degree. And yet over

that same period, we're going to have 3 million less workers, 20 to 40. So what the rich world needs is not, in fact, high-skill, high-talent, brain-drained kind of people exclusively. They would love to get those people. But what I'm talking about is the people with core work skills. And I think that isn't a brain drain. That is a wonderful thing for the developing world, because people just aren't going to be able to create the numbers of jobs they need to in the developing world. And hence, it's super win-win. That was Lant Pritchett, Research Director with the Think Tank Labor Mobility Partnerships, speaking with my colleague Ari Shapiro.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward.