How do we have enough children to sustain our future without depending on immigration?

Can men and women be equal but different?

What is a healthy expression of masculinity and femininity?

Are collapsing birth rates a sign that we are living out of tune with nature?

How do we end the gender war between patriarchy and feminism?

We need to give higher priority to having children, bringing them up well and maintaining a healthy, stable population. All our policies, taxes and workplaces need to support this objective. Since the sexual revolution of the 70s, our birth rate has dropped dramatically. We have more sex than ever but thanks to contraception and abortion, we have been able to decouple it from both love and reproduction. Whilst that is pleasurable, we haven’t been having enough children to maintain the population. We have been having fewer children, less often and much later. This has enabled us to pursue careers, relationships and personal development.

World population continues to grow substantially because of the high birth rates in Africa and the Middle East, but in many places, not just the West, the trend is towards rapidly falling birth rates. This is most marked in Japan, Russia and southern Europe and is even happening in places you wouldn’t expect such as Iran, where the average couple has 1.5 children. In Spain and Italy, it is down to 1.0. To maintain a healthy population that average needs to be about 2.4. We need to have enough children to provide the adult citizens of the future, to run the economy, to provide the services we need and to defend the nation. If we have too few, an excessive burden, financially and physically, will be placed on the shrinking population. The economy will suffer due to lack of manpower, lack of demand and rising labour costs. Public services will suffer due to lack of tax receipts and lack of people to do the job. Once that sets in, there is a risk of a spiral of deflation and a collapsing economy. So, even though we might like to gradually reduce the population of the world, it would be very harmful to do that precipitously.

In the short term, we are postponing the problem with an extremely high level of immigration. That carries its own risks in terms of social cohesion. Mass immigration is a short-term fix because, in most of the world, birth rates are falling substantially and economic and social conditions are improving. The pressure for migration will reduce and we won’t be up to depend on the current high levels of highly skilled migrants. Much sooner than we are expecting, there will be a tipping point at which the laws of supply and demand will flip and we will be desperate to attract immigrants and find it much harder to do so. The cost of labour will increase, the economy will suffer and our standard of living will fall.