What the Right gets wrong about fertility rates

Moving beyond the 'pro-natalism versus mass migration' paradigm

‘Mass migration is necessary in order for the West to survive.’ That old leftist adage, still in use throughout Europe, holds little sway over the native European population, especially when the regime’s mouthpieces on the one hand encourage native Britons to have fewer children to combat climate change, but on the other ridicule the Right for opposing mass migration given how necessary migrants supposedly are for the continuation of the NHS, the state pension, and so on.

In recent years, with the notable exception of the Conservative Party (at least prior to 2024), right-wing parties throughout the Old Continent have awoken to the stupidity of this (and, of course, to the popular rejection of said policies), and have since pivoted to a different idea: in order to solve the West’s demographic problem, rather than opening the gates of European countries to the teeming masses of the Third World, the birth rate of the native population must be increased. While this is a big step forward from the suicidal policies followed by the establishment up until very recently, both positions are in fact two sides of the same coin: namely, that in order to survive, the West needs to somehow compete with the Third World in terms of the number of young that our societies produce. Once we get Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Europe up to the magical number of 2.1 then — poof! — our future as a civilisation is secured.

The failure of ‘pro-natalist’ policies in Europe

That magical number of 2.1 (i.e., replacement-level TFR) has been obsessively chased by some of Europe’s most right-wing governments, yet it continues to elude them, and all evidence points to the gap between aspirations and reality widening in the future.

Consider Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Over the last ten years, Orbán’s Government has rolled out a barrage of incredibly ambitious measures intended to boost fertility rates. These include income tax exemptions for life for women who have four or more children and loaning, with interest below market rates, newlywed couples up to £25,000 (which does not have to be repaid at all if the couple has three children). In total, these measures are now costing around 5% of Hungarian GDP. Have these measures been successful? Judging by popular belief amongst those on the right, they have. The Spectator recently praised Orbán for ‘confounding the liberal orthodoxy that government cannot influence the decision of couples to conceive’. Hungary’s TFR has seen an unprecedented (in recent history in the West, at least) rise from 1.25 in 2010 to about 1.6 today, true, but this is still far below 2.1. To make matters worse, as in many other countries, there has been a post-COVID fertility bust in Hungary: the latest data shows that in the last year, TFR in Hungary has dropped significantly. There is every chance that 1.6 will prove to be the ceiling for Hungarian TFR. All this is before considering to what extent Hungarian TFR has been held up not by the birth rates of ethnic Hungarians (as Orbán surely intends), but rather by the many Romani Gypsies within Hungarian borders. A stark outlook indeed if the survival of our civilisation hangs on native Europeans being able to reach a TFR of 2.1.

Let’s assume, however, that Hungary did somehow manage to reach the required fertility rate through these policies. This still would not mean that in applying the same policies the rest of Europe would achieve the same results. It is crucial to remember here that Hungary’s demographic composition has emerged relatively unscathed from the successive waves of Third World migration that have rocked Europe since 2015. Were the same policies to be applied to countries in Western Europe, such as Britain, France, or Germany, they would undoubtedly primarily benefit precisely the sort of people that the Right deems as undesirable: Third World immigrants. The inescapable conclusion is that applying Orbán’s policies in Western European countries would be yet another form of redistributing the wealth of the native population to immigrants: increased taxation of the native population, thus making it even harder for them to have children, to pay for those who the Right does not even really want in the country in the first place to reproduce at a more rapid rate.

What would a policy that successfully combined nativism with pro-natalism in a Western European country look like? Given the legal and political impossibility of implementing policies that would benefit exclusively those of true Anglo-Celtic stock, similar results could be pursued using policies by proxy: for example, tax breaks could be granted to married couples earning over a certain amount of money who then had children. This would certainly be more palatable to the general public than policies based purely on ethnicity, but would still be politically impossible due to its perceived anti-working class effects. It would be precisely the opposite approach to that which was pursued — with popular support — by the Conservative Government in the early ’10s, which sought to save taxpayer money by increasingly means-testing child benefits.

However, to repeat ourselves, let us not lose sight of the fact that Hungary has not reached the magic number, 2.1, that we are told it requires; indeed, it hasn’t really even come close. It is not the only one. Poland, which has pursued similar (albeit somewhat less aggressive) pro-natalist policies, is seeing fertility rates no higher than the rest of Europe. In fact, today, Poland’s TFR is lower than that of many Western European countries. This is despite — yes, despite, more on this later — Poland becoming an increasingly rich country (it recently overtook Spain in the EU household wealth index, and is closer by the day to the EU average) and still being strongly religious, at least by European standards (87% of Poles self-identify as Catholic, about double the number of Britons that self-identify as Christian). Thus, if the European Right seeks to ensure the survival of Europe as a civilisation, it cannot rely on bringing our fertility rates to be on par with those of the developing world. This simply will not happen, despite the best efforts of many well-meaning people across the continent. We seem, therefore, to be doomed to swallowing the poison pill of mass migration — or so the current intellectual paradigm seems to suggest.

Demographic decline and the West: is it the exception, or is it the rule?

But is the West really the exception in terms of demographics? Are we in a uniquely tough situation? It wouldn’t seem so. China has massive fertility problems of its own, and not just as a result of its One-Child Policy: China’s TFR has continued to decrease even after the discontinuation of said policy, to the point where (if independent analysts are to be believed) it is approaching 1.0 TFR, with particularly low rates in the country’s most developed provinces. India, one of the few remaining major non-African countries that still had a TFR above 2.1, recently sunk below replacement-level TFR. The remaining Asian countries which haven’t already followed the giants of India and China down the path of demographic decline are not far above 2.1 TFR either. Meanwhile, most of Latin America has been below 2.1 for some time now, with TFR particularly low in relatively developed countries like Costa Rica and Chile. Some experts are now suggesting that the world population as a whole may already be shrinking. Even in Arab countries, TFR has been declining rapidly. While most remain substantially above the replacement rate, a typical rate today is around 2.5 — a massive drop from the rates of 6 or 7 as recently as the ’60s. It seems likely that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

This leaves us with Africa, and in particular Sub-Saharan Africa — the actual great exception. Fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are still astronomically high, standing at about 4.7 TFR, with some countries still above 6.0 TFR, despite a much lower infant mortality rate than some decades ago. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double by 2050. There is a caveat to all of this: the statistics for Sub-Saharan African are, if anything, unreliable. Aside from statistical failures, many also allege that the figures are being deliberately inflated in order to win more international aid money, or because of similar fraud at the more local level. Assuming, however, that the figures that Sub-Saharan African governments supply are accurate, it would seem Europe is in a sticky situation: given Africa’s relatively close proximity, its exploding population, the poverty of its peoples, and the miserable rates of GDP per capita growth in most of these countries, how are we to stem the wave of migration into Europe without the use of extreme force?

There are some reasons for optimism in this regard. While Africa is far behind the curve in this regard, African fertility rates are also sinking, and they are sinking fast. But fertility rates alone do not show us the whole picture here. Take a country like Egypt, which is far from being the most disastrous in Africa: Egypt’s population in 1900 was about 10 million; now, it is nearly 120 million. Imports account for more than two-fifths of Egypt’s calorie consumption. This is the harsh truth: ‘Africa is the most food-import-dependent region in the world’, to quote from a UN Development Program report. There’s also the matter of foreign aid, which was about 10% of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP in 2010, representing an increase from prior decades. And it’s not like Africa is about to break free of the aid dependency cycle and become self-sufficient: their economies are relatively stagnant, especially in per capita terms, despite their very low baseline (which allows for relatively ‘easy’ catch-up growth), and despite some African countries having received foreign aid non-stop for the past sixty years.

This is the realisation that the West must come to: Africa is completely dependent on us to survive (as I can hardly imagine that the Chinese will be sending billions to Africa in foreign aid in the near future). This gives us a signficant amount of power which we could be using to fix Africa’s population crisis, which is not one of depopulation but of overpopulation. A more active stance in Africa need not be terribly costly or manpower-intensive (as an example of this, see Executive Outcomes’ operations in Sierra Leone), yet would go a long way towards stabilising the region and preventing the routine wars and genocides that have helped contribute to bringing millions of people to Europe’s shores.

Why are fertility rates decreasing?

Before I talk about what exactly needs to change to protect Europe demographically, allow me to speculate on why exactly it is that fertility rates are decreasing both in the West and globally.

The ineffectiveness of fiscal incentives to childrearing can be exaggerated by some. Policies that alleviate the financial strain of having children on families do have some effect, as can be seen in Hungary. Britain’s middle classes are subjected to a level of taxation that is nothing short of robbery, all to subsidise a growing parasitical class in Britain, or to pay for courses that will educate rural Afghans about the need to allow women to go on OnlyFans. Mass migration has exacerbated an already severe housing shortage, leading to absurdly high rents and house prices. Those who have one or two children, but who want more, are often unable to have them due to space constraints. Alleviating these burdens would help give the necessary financial freedom to families for whom having children is too expensive. But we must not forget that for many adults it is not merely a matter of money: they simply do not want children, or at least do not want more than they already have.

Is it a cultural phenomenon then? Religious, perhaps? This is what most social conservatives would have you believe: decreasing religiosity is to blame for the lack of children. While there is some truth to this, even some countries in which many people identify as Christian, such as Poland, have incredibly low TFRs, often below those of many very secular countries. Perhaps it could be argued that the Poles are not ‘real Christians’. But even if we grant that the Poles are hardly religious fanatics, looking outside of Europe, Iran — a literal ‘Islamic republic’ ruled by a cleric — currently has fertility rates well below replacement levels. And again, it seems very unlikely that it is the effect of cultural changes specific to any one or any group of countries that is pulling down fertility rates, as evidenced by the fact that fertility rates are decreasing the world over, rich and poor, East and West.

So what then? I do not claim to have the full answer to this question, but it seems to me the reasons behind this collapse in fertility rates are considerably more profound than most commentators acknowledge. A clue may be found in the only developed country still above replacement-level fertility: Israel. While it is true that this is partially due to the astronomical TFR of Haredi Jews, ordinary Orthodox Jews and even secular Jews have an above-replacement TFR (though in the latter case, only just). What makes Israel stand out? It stands out in many ways, but I would suggest that the critical difference is that it is the only developed country still engaged in a genuine struggle for survival, or at the very least believes that it is. Israeli citizens involve themselves in this struggle completely, and it presents them with a purpose, be that fighting for their country or expanding its borders by becoming settlers. In short, Israel’s citizens realise that there is ‘space’ in which they can assert themselves, to use Bronze Age Pervert’s concept. Israeli fertility also has a number of interesting quirks that support such an interpretation, rather than explaining it through anything friendly to ‘social conservatism’ as popularly understood: for instance, the relative frequency (and social acceptability) of single women reaching close to the end of their fertility window impregnating themselves via sperm donors, with in vitro fertilisation paid for by the state. A ‘trad’ paradise this is not.

By contrast, in Europe we are lacking a mission; a driving, unifying goal, both at the civilisational and the individual level. As the average white-collar worker slaving away for a ‘Big 4’ accounting firm looks around him, all he can see is owned space: he cannot assert his will on anything by taking control of new space, because there is none. Once he comes to this realisation, the only real course left remaining for him to take is to indulge his senses in an attempt to drown out his feeling of anomie that, among other things, tells him that bringing children into this world is not worth it.

The urgent need for a paradigm shift

I was recently having lunch with a man who had been an ambassador to a wide array of African countries, most of which were in the super-high fertility areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. He was trying to convince me that my belief that there was no need for my country, Spain, to allow in millions of immigrants from Latin America was tantamount to civilisational suicide. ‘You don’t understand’, he said. ‘I have seen with my own eyes what is brewing in Africa. I have seen the great slum that is Lagos — shacks as far as the eye can see, and in them hordes of the destitute. Unless you bring over millions of Latinos — Spain’s cultural brethren — then, as the aged Spanish population dies off and the population dwindles, Spain will be run over by the masses from Africa.’

Total fertility rate by country, 2024. Data from Population Reference Bureau’s ‘World Population Data Sheet’.

Putting aside the obvious fallacy that is that Spaniards and Latinos are the same, I found the former ambassador’s beliefs to be quite telling; illustrative of those of Europeans at large. Here is a man who clearly wants the best for Europe, and he believes that the tides of history are such that the only way for Europe to be saved is to encourage one form of extreme mass migration over another. This complete lack of faith in the ability of one’s own countrymen, the belief that Europe has to weather the storm as best it can while it is consigned to becoming a mere tourist resort for the true powers of this century, is widespread amongst the European ruling classes, both Left and Right, and is solely responsible for our migration problems (we are not being ‘invaded’, we are simply opening the gates, entirely voluntarily, to migrants).

What is to be done, then? Can Europe keep its economy on the road without either massive immigration or a massive increase in fertility rates (or both)? It will not be easy, but I think it can. But to find this way out, we must first challenge the underlying axiom of the system, assumed by everyone from Keir Starmer to Elon Musk: that is, we must reject the notion that it is impossible for Europe to keep its prosperity if its population shrinks.

This is no small problem to solve: it involves rejecting such beloved concepts such as ‘GDP growth’, the uncritical worship of which has contributed to Western European countries admitting massive waves of low-skilled immigration. In many European countries, GDP growth (as opposed to GDP per capita growth, which is increasingly non-existent) is now mostly driven by the addition of new warm bodies via immigration. European countries are faced with a choice: we can continue with this current trend of addiction to cheap, low-skilled labour, which may look good in newspaper headlines but will definitively make us fall behind the United States and condemn us to be its colony, or we can invest heavily in industry and technology, deregulate, and aim for real economic growth based on capital deepening and an increase in productivity. It is this choice that is at the heart of the recent Draghi Report (‘The future of European competitiveness’), which describes this as ‘an existential challenge’.

It is not just the economics of the issue we should consider. Consider housing, one of the most discussed topics in politics today: the consensus seems to be that we need to build more houses for our growing population. But think for a second about where this leads us if we assume that it is necessary for our population to be constantly expanding: first it will be building on ‘low-quality green belt land’, next it will be the high-quality land, and by the end of next decade we will be considering the pros and cons of building social housing in the Lake District.

Population decrease may even help the British working class, whose wages are currently being kept stagnant by the incessant arrival of low-skilled migrants from the Third World. The Black Death was an economic boon for the mediaeval equivalent of the working class — for those that survived, anyway — because it drove their wages up considerably. While we live in a very different world, there is a chance that something similar could happen in Britain if we let population trends take their natural course instead of trying to game them by injecting millions of immigrants into the country or by spending hundreds of billions of pounds trying to get our TFR up to the magic number of 2.1.

Is this to say that we should celebrate our low fertility rates? No: the point is that boosting TFR to replacement level is probably impossible and, above all, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the West to survive. Instead of obsessing over how to prevent population decrease without immigration, the right should be thinking of how to harness the revolutions brought about by AI and automation so that even if the population does decrease, our economies won’t be badly affected. Europe’s future should be industry and technology, not Deliveroo and tourism. An increase in the fertility rates of native Europeans will eventually come naturally once we set our houses in order, but establishing it as our most important concern at the expense of everything else will not produce the desired results. In fact, the logic set in motion under the current intellectual paradigm would seem to suggest that if we continue to fall below replacement-level TFR, something that seems almost certain for the foreseeable future, we must then embrace mass migration. Don’t fall for the trap.

Everything, of course, is contingent upon one thing: Europe regaining the necessary faith in itself. Until we believe that we can solve our problems by ourselves and not be relegated to mere spectators — or worse — of the twenty-first century, we are doomed. Maybe in the future we will see a strong Europe that asserts itself in the world and takes control of its own destiny; maybe then, once they are united under a common purpose, will we see Europeans having more children.

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This article was written by Exhausted Food Guy, a Pimlico Journal contributor from Spain. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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