Mark Steyn - America Alone

Those who pooh-pooh the United States’ comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration — it’s the legions of the undocumented who are filling the maternity wards. In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate — 1.85 or so — than white women in Europe or Canada. And, from the Democrats’ point of view, as they preside over dwindling school enrollments from San Francisco to rural Vermont, the reality is that red-state white Americans breed above replacement rate. In demographic terms, the salient feature of much of the “progressive agenda” — abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood — is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively it’s a literal dead end.

As fertility dries up, so do societies. Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we’re headed. These countries are fading to oblivion unless they can change their ways, or train those orangutan citizens to serve the food at the seniors’ community center. The tax revenues that support the evergrowing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. The design flaw of the radically secularist Eutopia is that it depends on a religious-society birth rate.

So, if Europeans and Canadians can no longer be bothered to have children, where’s that workforce going to come from?

Easy, say the complaceniks at Toronto’s Globe and Mail. In 2004, reacting to the lowest Canadian fertility rate since records began and a 25.4 percent fall since 1992, the Globe’s editorialists wrote: “Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being, Canada is wellpositioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world.” Phew! So there’s nothing to worry about, eh? Thank goodness for that. Canadians can all go back to sleep while reading the “Celebrate Diversity”, booklet from the Department of Multiculturalism.

But hang on a minute: “talented people” from “overcrowded parts of the world”? Okay, name some.

The “experts” of the Western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the “population explosion” even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birth rates, were emptying through the nineties and oughts. In the ne plus ultra of doomsday tracts, The Population Bomb (1968), Paul Ehrlich begins with a blithely snobbish account of trying to reach his hotel in Delhi through the teeming hordes of humanity:

People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

But in the twenty-first century, even Delhi’s running out of people. Even Paul Ehrlich’s hellhole of choice doesn’t have a high enough birth rate to maintain its population in the long term. Yet the complaceniks cling to the long-held Euro-Canadian policy of using the Third World as a farm team and denuding developing societies of their best and brightest. In the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards made a big hoo-ha about “outsourcing” — i.e., American companies setting up a customer call center in Ireland or India. Outrageous!

Yet most of the West has outsourced its entire future to the Third World. Just as America relies on the Chinese to make cheap Elmos and Poohs, so Canada relies on them to make cheap human beings — the children that domestic manufacturers in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere have concluded are prohibitively expensive to produce at home. Personally, I’ve never seen what’s so liberal and enlightened, rather than lazy and selfish, about fleecing the Third World of its doctors and engineers. But, even if you approve of it, it won’t be an option much longer. The UN’s most recent population report has revised the global fertility rate down from 2.1 — i.e., replacement rate — to 1.85 — i.e., eventual population decline. World population will peak in about 2050 (I’d hazard earlier) and then fall. For Europeans too selfabsorbed or over-taxed to breed, the fallback position for their own barrenness — use the Third World as your nursery — is also dead.

Post-Christian hyper-rationalism turns out to be, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.

Birth rates in the so-called “overcrowded” parts of the world are already 2.9 and falling. India has a quickly growing middle class and declining fertility. In 2020 “talented people” will be much sought after by all countries within the developed-but-depopulating world: how sure can Canadians be that an educated Indian will prefer a high-tax, low-temperature jurisdiction to America or Australia? Or, come to that, to his own economically booming country, where the fruits of his labor won’t be shoveled straight into paying the debts run up by the wheezing boomers. The Third Worlders being born now in all but the most psychotic jurisdictions will reach adulthood with a range of options. By 2015, a smart, energetic Chinaman or Brazilian will be able to write his own ticket anywhere he wants. How attractive will the prospect of moving to the European Union and supporting a population of geriatric ingrate Continentals be? If that ratio of workers to retirees keeps heading in the same direction, the EU will have the highest taxes not just in the Western world, but in most of the rest. A middle-class Indian or Singaporean or Chilean already has little incentive to come to the Continent. If the supposedly insane neocon plan to remake the Middle East comes off, even your wacky Arabs may stay home.

There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. The world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “Western.” Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Europe and North America: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week. Meanwhile, in areas of traditionally moderate Islam, from the Balkans to Indonesia, Muslims are becoming radicalized and fiercer in their faith.

If a society chooses to outsource its breeding, who your suppliers are is not unimportant.

“I’ve heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child,” said Lyn Allison of the Australian Democrats, after a political opponent, Danna Vale, warned that the country could be swamped by Muslims. “If it wasn’t the Greeks, it was the Italians… or it was the Vietnamese.” But those are races or nationalities. Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one — unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it’s not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for many of its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression — a pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders. “You can’t find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad,” said the Aussie prime minister, John Howard, stating the obvious in a way most political leaders can’t quite bring themselves to do. “There is really not much point in pretending it doesn’t exist.” Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans, and currently the second biggest supplier of new Canadians. So it’s worth mulling over the question john Howard suggests: What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad? Five percent? Ten, 12,20 percent?