Is Population 'Replacement' a 'Conspiracy Theory'? No, it's an UN-Endorsed Program

Enter the UN Population Division and its 2001 Report on 'Replacement Migration', which lends credence to what used to be called 'far right-wing' and 'conspiracy theory'

‘Inspired’ by Alphabet/Google/Youtube’s censoring of an interview Marc Crispin Miller (NYU) with Tessa Lena, I thought about one of the more ‘controversial’ notions of the recent past.

So, let’s talk about what is known to demographers as a ‘theory’.

What is ‘Replacement Migration’?

As per Wikipedia (which renders it quasi-official), here comes a definition (here and in the following, references omitted, emphases mine):

In demography, replacement migration is a theory of migration needed for a region to achieve a particular objective (demographic, economic or social) [too bad this is but an assertion, not a statement, of facts] Generally, studies using this concept have as an objective to avoid the decline of total population and the decline of the working-age population.

Often, these overall declines in the population are influenced by low fertility rates. When fertility is lower than the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman and there is a longer life expectancy, this changes the age structure over time. Overall, the population will start to decline as there will not be enough children born to replace the population of people lost and the proportion of older individuals composing the population will continue to increase. One concern from this is that the age-dependency ratio will be affected, as the working-age population will have more dependents in older age to support. Therefore, replacement migration has been a proposed mechanism [by whom?] to try and combat declining population size, aging populations and help replenish the number of people in the working age groups.

Projections calculating migration replacement are primarily demographics and theoretical exercises and not forecasts or recommendations. However, this demographic information can help prompt governments [or the UN] to facilitate replacement migration by making policy changes.

The concept of replacement migration may vary according to the study and depending on the context in which it applies [why, then, do we need a definition?] It may be a number of annual immigrants, a net migration, an additional number of immigrants compared to a reference scenario, etc.

Bottom line here: ‘replacement migration’ is a real ‘thing’, it’s been studied in various contexts, and has an over-arching objective—to make good the difference between declining fertility rates of any given society and the number of children per woman required to replace the existing population at roughly stable levels (this is approx. 2.1 children per woman).

Where do we stand with this issue?

Here’s a bunch of data points and write-ups, courtesy of Our World in Data:

The metric demographers use to measure offspring per parent is the Total Fertility Rate. The TFR is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if the woman were to experience the current age-specific fertility rates throughout her lifetime. It is a metric that captures the fertility rate in one particular year rather than over the life course of a generation of women—it is a period, not a cohort metric…

From 1950 onwards we have very good data from the UN Population Division. The chart here shows the average across the world: the global Total Fertility Rate. Up to 1965 the average woman in the world had more than 5 children. Since then we have seen an unprecedented change. The number has halved. Globally, the average per woman is now below 2.5 children.

This is as momentous a change as anything, for humanity has never experienced such a phenomenon on a global scale. Yes, epidemics (e.g., the Black Death), famines, catastrophes (natural and man-made, such as wars) have historically caused population decline, but these were generally local or regional in its manifestations and limited in time and space. This time, though, this is a truly global matter.

Why has the global fertility rate fallen so rapidly?

We discuss in detail the reasons for this change in this section. In brief, the three major reasons are the empowerment of women (increasing access to education and increasing labour market participation), declining child mortality, and a rising cost of bringing up children (to which the decline of child labor contributed). [I’d add a fourth: massive anti-family/children propaganda]

What does declining global fertility mean for the population?

As a consequence of the declining global fertility rate, the global population growth rate has declined, from a peak of 2.3% per year in 1963 to less than 1% today. In our discussion on the global population rate, we explain that we are therefore in the transition to a new balance where rapid population change will come to an end.

‘The big global demographic transition that the world entered more than two centuries ago is then coming to an end: This new equilibrium is different from the one in the past when it was the very high mortality that kept population growth in check. In the new balance it will be low fertility that keeps population changes small.’ [no reference is cited at the above-linked site]

It’s available via the above-linked OWID content I cited; you can check out your country, too, but I’d also recommend juxtaposing North vs. South Korea to see glaringly obvious differences.

The UN Population Division on ‘Replacement Migration’

Back in 2001, the UN Population Division came out with a long-ish report on the subject matter. First, I’ll provide you with a few choice excerpts from their ‘press release’ that accompanied the report, which will be followed by a discussion of the report itself. I do, however, recommend you spend some time reading it.

The Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) has released a new report titled ‘Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?’. Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to prevent population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.

United Nations projections indicate that between 1995 and 2050, the population of Japan and virtually all countries of Europe will most likely decline. In a number of cases, including Estonia, Bulgaria and Italy, countries would lose between one quarter and one third of their population. Population ageing will be pervasive, bringing the median age of population to historically unprecedented high levels. For instance, in Italy, the median age will rise from 41 years in 2000 to 53 years in 2050. The potential support ratio—i.e., the number of persons of working age (15-64 years) per older person—will often be halved, from 4 or 5 to 2.

So, shouldn’t that be grounds for celebration among Malthusian population doom-mongers, such as our philanthropathic oligarchs, such as Bill Gates?

Where may one obtain said report?

As I learned when going through that press release, I found out that the websites have ‘shifted’. Now you need to click here to obtain the report, entitled ‘Replacement Migration’.

From the UN Report’s ‘Executive Summary’

Among the demographic trends revealed by those figures, two are particularly salient: population decline and population ageing.

Focusing on these two striking and critical trends, the present study addresses the question of whether replacement migration is a solution to declining and ageing populations. Replacement migration refers to the international migration that would be needed to offset declines in the size of population, the declines in the population of working age, as well as to offset the overall ageing of a population [note the similarity to the above-related Wikipedia entry].

The study computes the size of replacement migration and investigates the possible effects of replacement migration on the population size and age structure for a range of countries that have in common a fertility pattern below the replacement level. Eight countries are examined: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States. Two regions are also included: Europe and the European Union. The time period covered is roughly half a century, i.e., from 1995 to 2050.

According to the United Nations population projections (medium variant), Japan and virtually all the countries of Europe are expected to decrease in population size over the next 50 years. For example, the population of Italy, currently 57 million, is projected to decline to 41 million by 2050. The Russian Federation is expected to decrease from 147 million to 121 million between 2000 and 2050. Similarly, the population of Japan, currently 127 million, is projected to decline to 105 million by 2050.

Major Findings of this Report Include:

In the next 50 years, the populations of most developed countries are projected to become smaller and older as a result of low fertility and increased longevity. In contrast, the population of the United States is projected to increase by almost a quarter. Among the countries studied in the report, Italy is projected to register the largest population decline in relative terms, losing 28 per cent of its population between 1995 and 2050, according to the United Nations medium variant projections. The population of the European Union, which in 1995 was larger than that of the United States by 105 million, in 2050, will become smaller by 18 million [note that the EU was smaller by a sizeable margin—less members—in 1995 than it was when the report came out in 2001 (and it has increased further since].

Population decline is inevitable in the absence of replacement migration. Fertility may rebound in the coming decades, but few believe that it will recover sufficiently in most countries to reach replacement level in the foreseeable future.

Huhum, see that? Having more children now and in the foreseeable future will not change anything about this, demographically speaking. Why aren’t Mr. Gates and his ilk ‘celebrating’?

Some [sic] immigration is needed to prevent population decline in all countries and regions examined in the report. However, the level of immigration in relation to past experience varies greatly. For the European Union, a continuation of the immigration levels observed in the 1990s would roughly suffice to prevent total population from declining, while for Europe as a whole, immigration would need to double. The Republic of Korea would need a relatively modest net inflow of migrants—a major change, however, for a country which has been a net sender until now. Italy and Japan would need to register notable increases in net immigration. In contrast, France, the United Kingdom and the United States would be able to maintain their total population with fewer immigrants than observed in recent years [mind you, this report was written in 2001].

Isn’t it ‘strange’ (ahem), that the UN Population Division would write these things in 2001—and then all-but 112% reverse themselves within a few years? To say nothing about what happened in ‘Europe’ in 2015 and along the southern US borders right now?

The numbers of immigrants needed [by whom and for what purpose?] to prevent the decline of the total population are considerably larger than those envisioned by the United Nations projections. The only exception is the United States.

In case you missed the relevance here w/respect to esp. the Obama-Biden administrations’ decisions not to enforce the law and protect the border; to be fair, Mr. Trump was mostly talking it as opposed to doing something, if legacy media reporting is any guide (e.g., by the BBC). That being said, talking about this issue is, of course, way better than conspiring to exacerbate it, as Mr. Biden is doing.

The numbers of immigrants needed to prevent declines in the working-age population are larger than those needed to prevent declines in total population. In some cases, such as the Republic of Korea, France, the United Kingdom or the United States, they are several times larger. If such flows were to occur, post-1995 immigrants and their descendants would represent a strikingly large share of the total population in 2050—between 30-39% in the case of Japan, Germany and Italy [here’s a quick question for all those who continue to ‘welcome everyone’: how do you suppose representative democracy is going to work if between a quarter and a third of residents are ineligible to vote?]

Relative to their population size, Italy and Germany would need the largest number of migrants to maintain the size of their working-age populations. Italy would require 6,500 migrants per million inhabitants annually and Germany, 6,000. The United States would require the smallest number—1,300 migrants per million inhabitants per year.

The levels of migration needed to prevent population ageing are many times larger than the migration streams needed to prevent population decline. Maintaining potential support ratios would in all cases entail volumes of immigration entirely out of line with both past experience and reasonable expectations [there goes any first-world social security/insurance scheme, by the way, which is precisely what they’re saying: absent unprecedented immigration, ageing will destroy these schemes; unprecedented immigration will, however, destroy the social contract and totally remake—socially re-engineer our societies].

In the absence of immigration, the potential support ratios could be maintained at current levels by increasing the upper limit of the working-age population to roughly 75 years of age [here’s an election slogan: would you like to continue to retire ‘around age 65’ or suffer mass immigration with unknown consequences? Too bad all politicians are speaking with forked tongues here].

The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require a comprehensive reassessment of many established policies and programmes, with a long-term perspective. Critical issues that need to be addressed include: (a) the appropriate ages for retirement; (b) the levels, types and nature of retirement and health care benefits for the elderly; (c) labour force participation; (d) the assessed amounts of contributions from workers and employers to support retirement and health care benefits for the elderly population; and (e) policies and programmes relating to international migration, in particular, replacement migration and the integration of large numbers of recent migrants and their descendants.

Bottom Lines

If you thought, hey, wait a moment, what about the consequences of mass immigration to first-world societies, you’re not alone.

In fact, the UN Population Division published a study back in 2001 on the subject of ‘Replacement Immigration’.

Remember, by the way, when those who read, e.g., The Camp of Saints, the 1973 fictional novel by French author Jean Raspail were disparaged? They (we) were called ‘conspiracy nuts’, ‘NAZIs’, and the like.

For ‘deep insights’ into this, we yet again turn to Wikipedia, which provides the following commentary:

A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world. Almost forty years after its initial publication, the novel returned to the bestseller list in 2011.

On its publication, the book received praise from prominent French literary figures, and through time has also been praised by critics and politicians in Europe and the United States, but has also been criticized by both French- and English-language commentators for conveying themes described as racism, xenophobia, nativism, monoculturalism, and anti-immigration content. The novel is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.

In light of the above-related UN Report on ‘Replacement Migration’ (2001), Mr. Raspail has, I’d argue, been proven correct. Of course (rolls eyes), that makes him and everyone who questions, let alone criticises mass immigration, a ‘far-right-winger’ and ‘white nationalist’.

Of course, the usual suspects were (are) appalled, to say the least:

In 2001 [oh, what a coincidence—the year that UN Report came out], the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described The Camp of the Saints as ‘widely revered by American white supremacists’ and ‘a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries’, and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory. Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the SPLC, notes that ‘[t]he premise of Camp of the Saints plays directly into that idea of white genocide. It is the idea that through immigration, if it's left unchecked, the racial character and content of a culture can be undermined to the point of oblivion’. Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus argues that The Camp of the Saints, with its apocalyptical vision of a sudden and violent mass migration swarming towards Europe, is even more radical than Renaud Camus' Great Replacement theory, and therefore probably more influential on white nationalist terrorists.

See the framing? It doesn’t matter that it is the friggin’ United Nations Population Division that came out with a report entitled ‘Replacement Migration’ addressing exactly the issues Mr. Raspail wrote about in the early 1970s.

Of course, anyone who considers the veracity of the novel or the UN report is, in the terms of the SPLC, a ‘white nationalist terrorist’. Logically, this would include the United Nations (and that label might even be correct).

You cannot make this up.

Also, note that this was some twenty-one years before, in 2022, in his notorious speech (archived version) in Philadelphia, ‘Joe Biden’ told everyone in the US that ‘white supremacy’ is ‘the greatest threat to democracy’:

The idea that America guarantees that everyone be treated with dignity. It gives hate no safe harbor. It installs in everyone the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. That’s who we are. That’s what we stand for. That’s what we believe.

And that’s precisely what we’re doing—opening doors, creating possibilities, focusing on the future—and we’re only just beginning.

Source (paywalled); archived version.

To me, ‘opening doors’ and ‘focusing on the future’ in the context of uncontrolled mass immigration is—a not-even-thinly-veiled threat.

There’s also a section entitled ‘criticism’ in the above-related Wikipedia entry on ‘replacement migration’, which I shall also cite here for the sake of completeness:

Replacement migration as presented by the United Nations Population Division in 2000 [it was published in 2001] is largely perceived as unrealistic as a singular way of fighting population ageing [note that this isn’t the only issue in the report, and that’s also not what the report, as shown above, discusses]. One reason being that replacement migration tends to only be a temporary fix to aging populations. Instead of using replacement migration to combat declining and aging populations, government policy and social changes could be implemented [thus more gov’t dependency is supposed to ‘solve’ the problem created by…[drum roll] gov’t meddling in everyday life]. Therefore, replacement migration is said to be more useful as an analytical or hypothetical tool.

And thus we moved from ‘this is a friggin’ white supremacist far-right-wing conspiracy theory’ via an utter misrepresentation of what said UN report actually discusses to the ‘solution’ of more social engineering by ‘Big Gov’t’ while, at the same time, the initially derided ‘conspiratorial’ nature of the UN report was actually confirmed by calling it an ‘analytical or hypothetical tool’. This notion also applies to Mr. Raspail’s novel, by the way.

As discussed the other day exemplified by what goes on in Germany right now, ‘replacement migration’ is very real; it’s neither an ‘analytical’ issue or a ‘hypothesis’, but one of the main issues of the present and, arguably, the future.

Coda: Contemporary Delusions

In terms of last words here, we note, in passing, that the people who advocate for a much enhanced—I’d call it ‘totalitarian’ in aspiration—role of Big Gov’t in cahoots with supranational entities such as the UN, the WHO, or the EU are delusional at best.

Remember the more recent ‘crises’? A sampling includes:

• Think ‘9/11’ and its aftermath (it used to be called ‘The Global War on Terror’), which was run by ‘the best and the brightest’ who wielded ‘the finest fighting force in the history of mankind’. How did that end?

• The Great Financial Crisis of 2007/08 (official count) was also wonderfully ‘resolved’ by the equivalent of the Neocons in the Federal Reserve, on Wall Street, and the financiers in the City of London—by blowing up an even bigger bubble that’s certainly going to end like all other bubbles in history.

• The ‘interventions’ in Libya, Syria, Yemen (now incl. US-UK military strikes) were also carried out with the usual Western competence at display.

• Finally, we shall also mention the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ as yet another instance of ‘the best managers’ doing a formidable job of ‘saving humanity’.

Hence, my tentative conclusion is—these ‘power-brokers’ are delusional (at best), extremely incompetent (factually), and will stop at nothing to get their way. And they will fail; heck, we can see them failing already (here’s looking at you, Germany, Ukraine, Israel…).

Problem is, for those who remained connected to reality, this will entail a lot of hardship in the near- and medium terms.

It’s the proverbial issue of night being darkest just before dawn.

But there will be a new dawn, which also brings restored hope for a more sane future for us, our children, and the generations to come.