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the West wasting away from barrenness? Yes, says Pat Buchanan, who
argues that collapsing fertility rates in the developed world, combined
with an unavoidable spike in Third World immigration, and a loss
of faith in traditional Western cultural values, signal the imminent
decline and fall of Western civilization.
Buchanan makes
his case in his hot new book, The
Death of the West, which just completed its fourth week
on the New York Times best-seller list. The strongly polemical
book depends heavily on Buchanan's interpretation of demographic
data. NRO ran some of the book's key demographic claims by experts
in the population-research field to see if they hold up.
1. There
is no precedent in history for the collapsing birthrate in the developed
world.
This is largely
true. The birth rate has declined significantly below replacement
level for Europe and Japan, with the United States barely holding
even, and that owing to immigration. Tom Pullum, a University of
Texas sociologist, says you have to go back to Ancient Rome to find
a similar voluntary decline in fertility.
"Back
in the Thirties, fertility in this country was not below replacement,
but it was not that far above," says Pullum. "It never
got to the low levels we see today."
2. Between
2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion,
to nine billion, but this 50 percent increase in population will
come entirely in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Writes Buchanan,
"One hundred million people of European stock [will] vanish
from the earth."
Mostly true.
"Russia is already losing population. Italy, Spain, and Germany
are on the verge," said Julie DaVanzo, director of the Population
Matters program at RAND.
Jon Bongaarts
of the New York-based Population Council calls this "more or
less correct," saying that in 2050, "the population of
the developed world as a whole will be basically where it is today.
German, Italy, and Spain will be down 20 to 25 percent. The U.S.
and Australia will go up."
Yet Pullum
calls Buchanan's assertion "definitely too dramatic,"
saying that United Nations demographers, from whom Buchanan takes
his numbers, have a history of overstating their forecasts.
"Besides,
the projections have all been coming down for world population,
including in Asia," Pullum says. "The U.N. is predicting
that between 2025 and 2050, population will stabilize everywhere."
That's a view
endorsed by political commentator Ben Wattenberg, author of the
forthcoming Survival 101, which takes a more optimistic view
of demographics and immigration.
Says Wattenberg,
"Buchanan's data are incomplete. He fails to mention that fertility
rates in the undeveloped countries are also plummeting. I don't
like what's happening in Europe and Japan either, but though the
ratio between the West's population and that of the less-developed
world will change, it won't change forever."
3. To maintain
its current standard of living by 2050, child-starved Europe will
have to import over a billion immigrants. "Either Europe raises
taxes and radically downsizes pensions and health benefits for the
elderly, or Europe becomes a Third World continent."
Though they
may quibble with his precise numbers, demographers agree that Buchanan's
point is substantially true.
"The flow
of migrants required to keep things as they are in Europe is so
large that very few countries will be willing to accept it,"
says Dutch-born Bongaarts. "My guess is that those flows won't
happen. The political system won't stand for it."
Bongaarts predicts
European nations won't allow themselves to be overrun. They will
deal with the problem through a mixture of higher taxes, reduced
benefits, raising the retirement age, as well as higher immigration.
RAND's DaVanzo
says more European governments may experiment with tax breaks and
other incentives that encourage families to have more children,
with mixed results. Bongaarts credits government pro-natalist policies
with inching France's birth rate up higher than that of neighboring
European states.
Still, France's
birth rate remains below replacement level, and perhaps 10 percent
of its population comes from African and Arab countries, whose migrants
have relatively high birthrates (and, worrisomely, have proven strongly
resistant to assimilation, even over two or three generations).
Sweden tried pro-natalist incentives in the 1980s, and boosted its
birth rate to 2.01, just below replacement level (2.1), by 1990.
But by 1995, Sweden's birthrate was back down to 1.5.
"My impression
is that pro-natalist incentives have tended more to affect the timing
of when people have children rather than the total number they have,"
DaVanzo says.
4. "Only
the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem
to have given up — that the good life lies in bearing and raising
children and sending them out into the world to continue the family
and nation — can prevent the death of the West."
"That
statement is loaded with values, but I don't see that there's going
to be a return to that kind of a role for women," says UT's
Pullum. "Americans place a high value on having children, but
very few people go beyond two children these days, unless they have
two boys or two girls. I don't see that changing."
Others say
the decision to limit families to two children may have less to
do with financial limitations, and more to do with a decision working
moms make to ration the time and effort it takes to raise larger
families.
5. Immigration
from Mexico and the high fertility rates of Hispanic immigrants
to America are turning the United States into a Third World, non-Western
nation.
Wattenberg,
a pro-immigration conservative who mixes it up with Buchanan in
the current issue of The
American Enterprise, says he is "astonished" by Buchanan's
reading Latin Americans out of Western civilization.
"The acknowledged
hegemonic roots of Latin America are language — Spanish and
Portuguese — and the Catholic religion," Wattenberg says.
"Last I heard, Spain and Portugal are still European, and Catholicism
was still Western."
Wattenberg,
who debates these issues with Buchanan on the next two episodes
of his PBS program Think
Tank, adds that the fertility rate in Mexico is falling
rapidly.
"There
are some Mexican demographers who think they're already at replacement
level, and going to go below," Wattenberg says. "If you
have high out-migration and low fertility, you have an absence of
Mexicans. This is not going to continue indefinitely."
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