Reflections on the current immigration debate
in the UK
Jonathon
Porritt and Colin Hines
Jonathon
Porritt is a Patron and President of Population Matters, and an eminent writer,
broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development. He co-founded Forum for
the Future, and as Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission until
2009, spent nine years providing high-level advice to Government Ministers. His
most recent book, The
World We Made, seeks to inspire people about the prospects of a
sustainable world in 2050.
J.Porritt@forumforthefuture.org
Colin
Hines has worked in the environmental movement for over 40 years on the issues
of population, food, new technology and unemployment, nuclear proliferation and
on the adverse environmental and social effects of international trade and the
need to solve these problems by replacing globalisation with ‘progressive
protectionism’ – also the title of his latest book. He is also the convener of
the Green New Deal group and was the Co-ordinator of Greenpeace International’s
Economics Unit having worked for the organisation for 10 years.
The views expressed in this
paper are those of Jonathon Porritt and Colin Hines, in their personal
capacities.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DOI: 10.3197/jps.2017.2.1.43
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Porritt, J., and C. Hines. 2016. 'Reflections on the Current Immigration Debate in the UK
'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 2(1): 43–59.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2017.2.1.43
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
1. INTRODUCTION: THE EU’S
PRINCIPLE OF FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
There’s
an extraordinary irony about the current immigration debate here in the UK. Two
years ago, the UK was almost alone in pushing for far-reaching reforms to the
interpretation of the EU’s notionally sacrosanct principle of ‘freedom of
movement’. At the behest of the Tory Party’s hard-line Brexiteers, the then
Prime Minister, David Cameron, was humiliatingly despatched on a tour of EU
capitals to secure some small-scale (but cumulatively significant) changes in
what nation states would be permitted to do to allay concerns about
immigration. These were dismissed out of hand by the UK’s right-wing media,
which would brook no further delay in an all-or-nothing Referendum on our
continued membership of the EU.
Two
years on, there isn’t a country in Europe where the debate about immigration
isn’t very live indeed – apart from the UK! Astonishingly, immigration had
almost no visibility at all in the 2017 General Election campaign, and (as yet)
has played only a diminished walk-on role in the current Brexit negotiations.
This
new positioning across the EU was best summed up by Emmanuel Macron in his
election campaign earlier in the year, arguing that asylum, refugee and
migration policy “must be profoundly reformed”. Since then, he’s floated the
idea elsewhere of a “Continental Partnership” between Britain and the EU that
would allow for further restrictions on the freedom of movement whilst ensuring
some kind of access to the single market. We shall examine other, equally
important shifts amongst EU politicians later in this paper.
Similar
changes are beginning to emerge here in the UK. As Vince Cable says, “I think
you can interpret freedom of movement in a much more pragmatic way.” Indeed,
the makings of such an agreement are already there, including David Cameron’s
hard-won, pre-Referendum reforms. Perhaps most importantly, things are changing
within the Labour Party, where support for such ideas is growing, bit by bit,
led by Chuka Umunna, Stephen Kinnock, Stephen Doughty and many others. They
point out that even today’s freedom of movement is not an unconditional
principle. EU citizens can be required to leave if they have no job or prospect
of a job three months after arrival. Restrictions are explicitly allowed for
reasons of “public policy, public security or public health”, including an
emergency brake if public services are being overwhelmed.
It’s
clear that both Labour and the Lib Dems are inching tentatively to
repositioning themselves in a way that would allow them to demonstrate that
they have responded to people’s concerns, and are now able to address one of
the biggest concerns of Brexit voters in the 2016 Referendum – namely, the
imperative of being able to manage much more effectively migration from other
EU countries.
2. THE CONTEXT
2.1. Facts and Perceptions
Before
digging deeper into that increasingly dynamic scene, we need to establish a
context – what exactly is going on that has stirred such controversy around
immigration here in the UK, where the situation has changed dramatically over
the last couple of decades?
In
2001, the UK population was estimated to be 59.1 million, with 4.9 million
(8.3%) of foreign birth. By 2011, the population of the UK stood at 63.2
million, an increase of 4.1 million, with the foreign born population at 8
million (12.6%) (Migration Watch, 2016). By June 2016, the population of the UK
had risen to around 65,648,000, an increase of 538,000 in one year (similar to
the annual growth rate over the last 12 years) (ONS, 2017).
An
important statistic here is the percentage of live births in England and Wales
being born to mothers from outside the UK. In 1990, it was 11.6%; by 2015, that
had risen to 27.5%, the highest level on record (ONS, 2016). It is estimated
that net migration (the difference between those arriving in and those leaving
the country in any one year), plus births to foreign-born parents, has
accounted for 85% of UK population growth since 2000 (Migration Watch, 2016).
In
December last year, the Office for National Statistics reported that 650,000
people migrated to the UK in the year up to June 2016, and 315,000 left, making
the total net migration figure 335,000.
Between
2004 and 2016, there were around one million migrants from Eastern European
countries coming to the UK. As indicated above, many end up returning to their
home countries. Over 90% of international migrants to the UK go to England
rather than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Migration Watch, 2016).
If
net migration continues at around recent levels, then the population of the UK
is expected to rise by nearly 8 million people over the next 15 years (almost
the equivalent of the population of Greater London at 8.7 million), and by 9.7
million over the next 25 years, from an estimated 64.6 million in 2014 to 74.3
million in 2039. It is assumed that net migration will account for around 50%
of this projected increase over those 25 years, but 75% of this increase would
be from future migration plus the children of those migrants. There is no
particular reason why this level of population growth will stop there. Unless
something is done to change current policy, growth is projected to increase
towards 80 million in 25 years, and to keep going upwards (Office for National
Statistics, 2015).
By
any standards, this is a big change in the lives of a lot of UK citizens:
roughly half a million new residents arriving in the UK, every year, for the
last ten years. So why would anyone imagine that this kind of ‘demographic
disruption’ would not be of concern to many people here in the UK? Much of that
growth happened during the time when Labour was in power, and many former
Labour Ministers have acknowledged that they simply failed to understand either
the short-term impacts of such changing circumstances, or the long-term
implications. And public opinion has changed a lot during that time.
Despite
uncertainties involved in measuring and interpreting public opinion, the
evidence clearly shows high levels of opposition to immigration in the UK. In
recent surveys, majorities of respondents think that there are too many migrants
in the UK, that fewer migrants should be let in to the country, and that legal
restrictions on immigration should be tighter. (The Migration Observatory,
2016.)
Immigration
is ranked by people consistently among the top five issues facing the UK. As of
June 2015, it was the issue picked most often by respondents (45%), followed by
the NHS (40%) and the economy (26%). In the 2013 British Social Attitudes
survey, large majorities endorsed reducing immigration: over 56% chose ‘reduced
a lot’, while 77% chose either ‘reduced a lot’ or ‘reduced a little’. Levels of
concern about EU and non-EU immigration were roughly similar amongst citizens
in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Whereas in Greece,
Italy and France, most were concerned about immigration from non-European
countries. (The Migration Observatory, 2016.)
2.2. The Dilemma for the
Progressive Left
All
this poses a massive dilemma for those whose views are centre-left and
generally progressive. They remain reluctant to acknowledge that large numbers
of people are angry because they ‘were never asked’ about what would be the
right level of immigration for the UK. Worse yet, they remain insensitive to
the fact that this demographic disruption has been significantly exacerbated by
the economic reality of many people’s lives in the UK and elsewhere.
This
kind of large-scale migration has occurred at a time (between 2005 and 2015)
when, on average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies
experienced stagnant or falling real incomes. In the USA, for instance, the
median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four
decades ago. The income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for
over 30 years (Jacques, 2016). This has led (in ways that should be wholly
understandable to anyone of a progressive persuasion) to growing and now
chronic insecurity on the part of tens of millions of people in such countries,
and particularly in the UK and the USA.
The
fact that very high net levels of immigration may have had a relatively limited
but broadly positive impact on the economic prospects of most people (as
demonstrated by a number of reports from the Office for Budget Responsibility)
is neither here nor there. What cannot be disputed is that mass immigration has
cut the earning power of the unskilled:
Mass
immigration increases inequality. This is the unpalatable fact the liberal left
in Britain refuses to accept. Markets are imperfect instruments. But it is not
necessary to subscribe to free market economic theory to believe that large
increases in supply tend to drive down the price. And the price of labour is
the wage. New Labour allowed direct competition to enter the UK labour market
on a scale unprecedented in our history. It is the relatively unskilled in the
bottom half of the distribution who have lost out. The liberal elite do not
suffer. Indeed, they benefit because many of the services they consume are
provided at lower prices than would have been the case without mass
immigration. It is sometimes argued that immigrants do jobs that native British
workers are unwilling to take. Very well then, without mass immigration,
employers would be obliged to raise the real wage rate to induce these people
to take the jobs. (Ormerod, 2015)
We
would argue that there are many other and more important causes behind today’s
rising inequality – not least the kind of neoliberal globalisation that has
dominated our economies for the last 50 years. We now know, indisputably, that
a rising tide does not lift all boats. But we have to become far more
sympathetic to those whose boats are now so hopelessly stuck in the toxic mud
of that cruel ideology.
And
here’s the thing: all of that can only get a great deal worse in the future.
There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the situation in the Middle East
(and pre-eminently in Syria) is a kind of ‘geopolitical blip’ before stability
returns to the region, and that migration pressures from the Middle East will
therefore slow. And even less reason to suppose that population growth in many
African and Middle East countries will move through the usual ‘demographic
transition’ towards declining fertility levels.
What
we do know, as a matter of increasingly painful inevitability, is that the
lives of tens/hundreds of millions of people (particularly in Africa and the
Middle East) will be devastated by the effects of climate change. We know that
many of those people will have no choice but to leave their homes and
communities if they are to have any prospect of survival, let alone a better
life. And we know that many of them will seek to come to Europe, as the place
that offers the best possible refuge in an all-encompassing storm that is not
of their own making.
One
snapshot of the potential scale of mass migration without border controls was
provided by a global Gallup poll of half a million people in 154 countries
(representing more than 98% of the world’s adult population) that took place
between 2010 to 2012. This underscored how potentially well-founded public
concerns are in richer countries about uncontrolled mass migration. It showed
that around 630 million of the world’s adults would like to leave their country
and move somewhere else permanently, with 42 million expressing a preference
for the UK, a destination second only to the United States. And that’s even
before the impact of accelerating climate change.
3. IMPLICATIONS FOR POLITICS
TODAY
Despite
such a rapidly evolving context, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, in the
meantime, have largely stuck to a script that extolls the benefits of the EU’s
freedom of movement principle and of large-scale immigration, whilst choosing
to downplay the disbenefits, even as the gap between them and public opinion
continues to get wider. Worse yet, they have often set out to imply that any
deviation from ‘the script’ (on the part of individuals in any of those three
parties) encourages hidden racist or xenophobic tendencies, and are therefore
(by definition) ‘unprogressive’. In the meantime, the
Conservative Party and others on the Right of the political spectrum have
succeeded in using anxiety about large-scale immigration to spearhead every
other aspect of today’s divisive, illiberal politics.
An
‘open borders’ position still has strong support across the progressive
spectrum. A new ‘Alliance for Free Movement’ was launched in February this
year, demonstrating yet again that many people still apparently believe that
the free movement of people provides a bulwark against unacceptable
neo-liberalism, instead of seeing it for what it really is – the principal tool
used by unaccountable neo-liberalism to keep wages low and workers cowed.
The
free movement of people can build our collective power and creativity in the
face of attempts by the super-rich to turn the world into a gigantic
marketplace, in which we are all isolated individuals competing against one
another. (The Alliance for Free Movement, undated.)
In
other words, the will of the millions of people in the UK who feel (and often
are) left behind, who in no way count themselves as beneficiaries of an
inherently unjust global economic system, and who want politicians to take back
control by actively managing and progressively reducing immigration, alongside
other critical measures, must apparently be set aside so that we can make the
privileges of our still relatively wealthy country accessible to all-comers.
What
lies behind this irrationality? Global inequality and its history are elegantly
cited as the reason that rich countries have an apparently permanent,
non-negotiable moral and legal responsibility, forever into the future, to take
in economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. It’s part of the burden of
our imperial past. And that means that the push factors behind migration (war,
inequality, and environmental threats[1]) have to be tackled first, before we even
begin to think about limiting the options for those escaping such destructive
trends.
The
irony here is telling. Many of the organisations in the vanguard of the fight
against the worst excesses of today’s neo-liberal globalisation are the ones
that are most outspoken in favour of open borders. The fact that it is the
self-same, self-serving elites that benefit most from an open borders,
pro-globalisation position, goes unremarked. Open borders for capital, goods,
services and people is a precondition for neo-liberalism to thrive in the EU,
regardless of its impacts on individual nation states, on communities hollowed
out by the loss of jobs and on thriving local economies, and on the countless
individuals ‘left behind’ by this devil-take-the-hindmost form of capitalism.
Yet still we are told that ‘freedom of movement of people’ is the sine qua non of progressive politics today.
The
reality is that progressive politics in the UK cannot prosper unless it can
call on the broad and deep support of millions of people in the UK whose values
are still all about fairness, about
progress (as in better lives for their communities as well as for their own
families and children), and about that delicate balance between entitlements
and obligations. The majority of those people believe that an ‘open borders’
position is demonstrably unfair, is insensitive to their understanding of what
makes for cohesive, tolerant communities, and may also dilute their
entitlements (particularly in terms of education, housing and social services)
at a time when so many things are becoming less and less secure.
4. POTENTIAL POLITICAL FALLOUT
The
current positioning around the issue of immigration of those on the Left is not consequence-free.
What has to be recognised by politically active progressives in the rich
countries is that if they continue to dismiss concerns about immigration as
ignorant and ill-informed, or even racist and xenophobic, then the future will,
without doubt, belong to the right, and even to the extreme right. The likes of
Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen have focussed ruthlessly on how to benefit from
public concern about immigration, and media powerbrokers such as the Daily Mail
have become only too adept at whipping up such sentiments.
4.1. Stealing the brightest and
the best
Moreover,
such positioning is far from “progressive” when seen from the perspective of
countries losing some of their most talented citizens as they exit to work in
wealthier countries. There was a lot of concern in the UK in 2013 that the
extension of freedom of movement rights to Romania and Bulgaria in 2014 would
result in the arrival of masses of “beggars and benefits cheats”. That didn’t happen.
Indeed, the reality is very different: it’s the Romanian health service that is
experiencing the real migration crisis, as their newly-trained doctors leave
for UK and other rich countries. The number of doctors in Romanian hospitals
has fallen by virtually a third from 21,400 to 14,400 since 2011 (Gillet and
Taylor, 2014).
This
is typical of our inability to see what the real problems are here. Britain is
the world’s second largest importer of health workers after the US, including
more than 48,000 doctors and 86,000 nurses in 2014. While 5% of Italy’s and 10%
of Germany’s doctors were born overseas, the figure for the UK is 26%.
Incredibly, since 2000 at least 11,000 doctors in the Philippines have
retrained as nurses and gone abroad, earning four or five times as much as they
would as a doctor back at home (McGeown, 2014). The country provided the
highest number of non-British qualified nursing, midwifery and health visiting
staff, with 8,094 out of a total of 309,529 for whom data was available. The
Philippines also provides the third highest number of NHS staff overall with
12,744. While the figures help illustrate the extent of the contribution of
migrants, they do not paint the whole picture, as many will have taken British
nationality since arriving (Siddique, 2014).
In
terms of nurses, more than one third of NHS trusts went overseas to recruit
nurses in the last year, with even more drawing up plans to do so now. While
many NHS trusts targeted countries in Europe, several travelled thousands of miles
to the Philippines, Australia, the US and India in search of staff. A main
driver of this process is the shortages following the axing by NHS Trusts of
thousands of nursing posts, in an attempt to find £15bn of ‘efficiency savings’
by 2015, leading to redundancies and freezing of posts, so that staff who
retired were not replaced.
Rich
countries (and the skilled migrants they attract) do indeed benefit from this
permanent brain drain from poorer societies. It allows them to prop up any
sectors of their economy with domestic labour shortages, and so avoid the
necessity of investing properly to train more of their own, and to pay them
properly. But the negative impact in those countries from whom these
highly-qualified personnel are recruited is extremely significant. In truth,
stealing the brightest and the best from poor countries is the polar opposite
of good, responsible internationalism.
4.2. Impact on infrastructure
If
net migration continues at around recent levels, as already explained, then the
UK’s population is expected to rise by nearly 8 million people in 15 years,
almost the equivalent of the population of Greater London (8.7 million). At
least 75% of this increase would be from future migration and the children of
those migrants. As already indicated, future population growth would not stop
there. Unless something is done about this growth, it is projected to increase
towards 80 million in 25 years and keep going upwards.
It’s
important to be completely logical about this. The UK is already struggling to
maintain critical infrastructure, to meet housing demand, and to invest
sufficiently in education, healthcare and social services. These increasingly
significant deficits are not caused by high levels of immigration: they’re
caused by wretchedly inadequate economic and fiscal policy, going back at least
a couple of decades.
But
continuing population growth clearly exacerbates those deficits. The UK’s Total
Fertility Rate has not been above 2.1 children per mother since 1972, but
‘population momentum’ (the increase in the numbers of births when babies born
at the peak of population growth reach reproductive age), plus net immigration,
has led to a population increase of nearly 10 million people since 1972.
Beyond
that, if 75% of future population growth is accounted for by immigration,
rather than by any ‘natural increase’, these pressures will build and build, as
the direct and inevitable consequence of the sheer growth in the numbers of
people using the nation’s infrastructure, needing proper housing, and relying
on high quality education, healthcare and social services.
That
is not the fault of individual immigrants – far from it. But net immigration
(of around 335,000 a year over the last two years) obviously contributes to
these problems.
Housing
provides the most obvious example of this. The Local Government Association
calculates that we need half a million new homes to avoid ‘an emerging
nightmare’. More than three million adults aged between 20 and 34 are now
living with their parents; house prices are rising faster than average
earnings, and there are at least 1.7 million households on the waiting lists
for affordable homes across England. The number of people renting has doubled,
and the average first-time buyer is now aged 35. This housing deficit is
already causing untold social and economic damage, and there are no long-term
solutions in sight.
5. DEVELOPING A MORE REALISTIC
POLITICS AROUND IMMIGRATION
5.1. A Changing Scene in the
EU?
Although
we hear relatively little about this in the UK press, many European countries
are now beginning to address exactly the same challenge: finding appropriate
policy responses to the will of majorities in their countries to lessen the
flow of migrants.
The
previous Dutch Deputy Prime Minister, Lodewijk Asscher, has stated that “support for free movement is
crumbling when people see that it turns out to be so unfair”, and that Britain
leaving the EU “gives a unique opportunity to do this in a very different way”
(Redgrave, 2017)
Former
Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and
former Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, have
called for debates on the application of the free movement principle. The EU
Commission’s Vice-President, Jyrki Katainen, has talked of understanding the
“unwanted consequences” of freedom of movement (Ibid.).
The
Social Democrat Austrian Chancellor, Christian Kern, has called for the EU to
reconsider freedom of movement rules, and in particular to consider
discrimination in favour of indigenous job-seekers. He has proposed a system
whereby “only if there is no suitable unemployed person in the country can [a
job] be given to new arrivals without restriction” (Chance, 2013).
Nor
is the European Commission deaf to these voices. It has recently tightened up
its rules on access to social security, saying that Member States may decide
not to grant social benefits to mobile citizens who are economically inactive,
meaning those who are not working or actively looking for a job, and do not
have the legal right of residence on their territory. Even in Germany, there’s
a profound re-think going on, with the German Bundestag in the process of
introducing significant restrictions on all benefits for non-German EU citizens
(Toynbee, 2017).
So why
would we not be supportive of an emerging Europe-wide reinterpretation of the
principle of freedom of movement? This could include some of the policies
agreed by the EU 27 in 2015 during David Cameron’s renegotiation; it was agreed
at that time that it is legitimate for countries to take measures where an
exceptional inflow of workers from elsewhere in the EU is causing serious
problems to a Member State’s welfare system, labour market or public services.
The
Lib Dems have already moved significantly in this direction. Former UK Deputy
Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, recently stated: “There are plenty of politicians
across the European Union who are now volubly saying that they think there
needs to be a change to freedom of movement. So there is scope for a Europe-wide
approach to this which I think would satisfy some of the government’s needs”
(Clegg, 2017).
5.2. Beyond the EU
At
the same time, it’s equally important to make this stricter approach to
immigration more acceptable for those living in poorer countries, by promising
realistic prospects of improvement in their domestic economic and social
conditions. And the crucial thing here, obviously, is to tackle the root cause
of why people leave their friends and culture in the first place.
The
indigenous populations of host countries have a right to control entry, taking
into account not only their own interests but also a sense of charity to
others. But in exercising charity, their chief concern should be the vast group
of poor people left behind in countries of origin, rather than the relatively
tiny group of fortunate people who get dramatic increases in their income
through being permitted to migrate. (Collier, P. p.270)
Beyond
the horror of war and conflict, much of this is to do with poverty and people’s
immediate economic prospects, or with their sense of security and personal
freedom in autocratic, oppressive political circumstances. But much of this
also goes back to ruthlessly imposed notions of international competitiveness,
which pit nations against each other in beggar-thy-neighbour economic warfare
in the global economy.
Just
to repeat the point from a domestic UK position, it must be made crystal clear
during the debate about optimum levels of migration, that immigrants already in
the host country should be under no pressure whatsoever to leave. Indeed, both
of us are supportive of immediately guaranteeing the rights of all EU citizens
currently working in the UK on current terms. Every effort should be made to
encourage integration in a way that promotes more harmonious communities.
Indeed, such a coming together might be made easier if the future is seen to be
one where communities don’t have to experience future levels of the kind of
unacceptably large, permanent inward migration to which they are so strongly
opposed. Such a clear-cut reduction in the number of economic migrants could
also mean that the public becomes more rather than less amenable to a larger
number of refugees being provided with a safe haven.
Against
that kind of backdrop, it becomes possible to redefine the kind of progressive
internationalism that we will need for the future. All foreign policy, all
trade agreements, and all aid and development transfers will need to be
focussed on minimising those factors that persuade people that their chances
are better off outside their country than inside. Arms sales will need to be
dramatically curtailed. Aid and development policies must prioritise employment
opportunities for young men and women. Education for girls and access for all
women to reproductive healthcare and fertility management must take centre
stage in order to help reduce population growth.
In a
world where overall population growth projections are rising, and where global
migration is also on the increase, it is a complete dereliction on the part of
all those on the progressive Left (and of environmentalists in particular) to
continue to ignore population growth and not to campaign for its reduction.
Without this decrease, all solutions to other aspects of ecological and social
concern are made far more difficult to deal with. This refusal to engage
becomes harder and harder to explain.
The
demographic link between population and immigration is really not in dispute.
At the beginning of 2012, the population of Europe was estimated at 503.7
million, an increase of more than 100 million since 1960. In 2011, around 68%
of Europe’s population growth came from net migration, which continues to be
the main determinant of population growth as it has been since 1992. Given the
ageing population in Europe, future population decline or growth will depend
primarily on the contribution made by migration (Eurostat, 2017).
Continued
global population growth is inevitable for the next few decades, but whether it
continues in the longer term will be determined by the policy goals of nation
states and the international community, as well as the resources allocated to
ensure these policies are implemented successfully. The longer the delay in
adequately focussing on the need to reduce population growth, the more momentum
is built into the system for a continued increase in human numbers.
So
let us end with one more round of inconvenient statistics. In 2016, world
population was estimated to be 7.4 billion (Population Reference Bureau, 2016).
Currently, it continues to grow, although more slowly than in the recent past.
However, it is still rising by approximately 83 million people per year.
According to the 2017 United Nations World Population Prospects Report, world
population is projected to increase by more than one billion people within the
next 15 years, reaching 8.6 billion people in 2030, increasing further to 9.8
billion in 2050, and to as much as 11.2 billion by 2100 (UN, 2015).
This
2100 figure represents a projected increase of nearly 300 million as compared
with its 2012 report, which had a “medium-variant projection”[2]of 10.9 billion by 2100 (UN, 2017). This
in turn was an increase of 800 million over the projections just two years
before, in 2010, that the world population at the end of the century would
stand at 10.1 billion (UN, 2011, page xvi). In other words, the UN world population
projections for 2100 have increased, over the last six years, by over a billion
people, from 10.1 to 11.2 billion.
This
is a completely surreal situation in which we now find ourselves, and one which
deserves far more attention from politicians of all parties.
Notes
[1] The exclusion of population growth
from this list is another massive blind spot for those who subscribe to
the open borders position and indeed for “progressive spectrum” politics in
general.
[2] The UN’s “medium-variant projection”
assumes a decline in fertility in those countries where large families are
prevalent, but also a small increase in fertility in countries with a fertility
rate of less than 2.
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T., 2013. On migration, population and
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