Going by current estimates, immigration can plug the demographics gap (by accelerating the problem elsewhere mostly) for a minimum of 100 years, probably 200 and maybe even 300+ depending on growth patterns and economic developments.
So yes, it’s going to be a solution for as long as America has been a country, France as a republic, longer than Germany and Italy united, more than many modern countries have existed. If that’s not a long-term solution, I don’t know what is.
There are no thousand year solutions here. We can only pass the problem to our (many-times) descendants and hope that they figure it out.
Only in the sense that there are enough people in aggregate, ie you don't care about anything other than the person being a person. It's not actually realistic to think European countries will just let in a bunch of people from another culture, forever, just to fix the demographic problem.
That’s why I’m, unlike most pro-immigration people, very pro assimilation —- language proficiency tests, an intentional strategy of educating immigrant young in public schools, dispersing large immigrant diasporas throughout the country, etc. I agree that immigration without at least some policy of assimilating them is a recipe for perpetual social unrest and instability.
In the US, successful assimilations look mostly like this. Kids go to American public schools, start forgetting their parent’s language and culture, leading them to look pretty much like every other American. The Chinese do it much more harshly without a drastic increase in efficiency, so the soft route seems to be the sweet spot. There’s no reason to think that you can’t assimilate them. Discourage mosques, try to disperse high concentrations of non-assimilated cultures, it’s not new and it mostly works.
No policy lasts forever. We’re not looking for the next thousand-year solution to the demographic crises; immigration is the 100-year plan, so to speak. We can’t — and shouldn’t —- try to write policy for the next thousand years. There is no other area in which we demand solutions for more than a century. Eventually this policy too will wear out and our descendants will have to go back to the drawing board.
Yup, and in almost every country in the world fertility rates are dropping. We will face a global demographic crisis within a century. We are either going to have to start having kids again or we are in for a brave new world type future, or extinction.
One solution few people mention but that can probably work, is direct solution: hire women to have children, and pay them a wage conditioned on the kids' physical and mental health. Put no limits on those children's numbers, accept that they will be half-literate, traumatised folks - ok they will make perfect post-industrial serfs, but at least they will be there.
