I wrote this on tumblr nearly a year ago in reply to:
byjove:
countries will be like “nooooo our birth rate is falling exponentially and it’s effecting our economy” and immigrants will be like “hey can you let us in so we can boost your economy and fill your empty jobs and raise our children here” and inevitably the country is like “the only thing worse than a large scale collapse of our population is letting foreigners live here”
byjove:
America’s immigration policies are difficult enough but I read the immigration policies for some countries and it is batshit insane. they’re straight up like “we hate disabled people, we hate people who don’t speak our language, if you don’t have a $85k a year salary lined up for you, we don’t want you to move here. if by some miracle you jump through all the hoops and move here, it will take you 20 years to obtain citizenship and during that time we will not rent to you because you’re a foreigner.” damn bitch. fuck you.
lannamichaels:
I read foreign policy stuff and every few months, like clockwork, there’s an article about [insert country here] having demographic problems caused by not enough young people and What That Means.
And every single time, I have only two questions:
1. What is your immigration policy?
2. How much does it cost to have and raise a baby, both direct monetary and intangibles, such as does a woman destroy her entire professional career to do so?
Fixing both of those will fix every single falling population problem I have ever read about in those places. Because the answer is generally “both. both are bad.” And places where the second one is considered to be fine, the first one absolutely isn’t.
(I state these are the constant issues at play in foreign policy writings to contrast that with the stuff I’ve heard about from rural demographic problems where the issue is “we have young people, but they leave because there aren’t any jobs.” That is internal population shifting within a country and comes with other problems, ex: rent.)
I bring this up here now because I'm not going to keep adding on to someone else's post, especially this long after, but we have a new entry in the "every so often Foreign Policy likes to talk about birthrates" trend and it's...
It's an entire article about how Israel doesn't have this problem, because Jewish women tend to have lots of kids compared to the rest of the countries considered equivalent economically, and at NO POINT mentions the Holocaust.How oh how do you have an article about how Jewish women have a culture where having a lot of kids is considered necessary and DO NOT MENTION THAT, I do not know. It probably gets included in, oh, it's a religious reason, but except not that much because it points out that secular Israelis also have more kids on average than the comparison population.
The author cannot be this clueless. Was it just that he felt it awkward to point out there is the actual need to
repopulate????? Even I have heard from women dealing with infertility who feel like complete failures because they can't help poke Hitler in the eye.
As a complete aside, though, since I'm on this subject, many things piss me off in Harry Potter and Harry Potter fandom but among the worst is the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur Weasley are the only characters in that entire backstory who understood the assignment.
Congratulations, you have just managed to survive a genocide that wiped out an entire generation! What do you do?
Every other character: uh, have one or two kids?
Arthur and Molly Weasley: hold our birth control.
Yes, yes, I'm aware that in context, the Weasleys aka "poor and red haired with more children than they can afford" are anti-Irish bigotry. Also we don't know too much about random other characters and their families, true.
But seeing it repeated in fandom? Oh, that's a lot of people who don't know what it's like to be part of a people that survived a genocide five minutes ago.
The magical world is in a massive demographic problem* and the Weasleys are the only ones who are taking it seriously.
*all this random extra ridiculous pureblood stuff that isn't in the books that has become some kind of calcified fanon
also makes no sense, and part of the reason it makes no sense is that your population size is
too goddamn small. The magical world in Britain, if we take the numbers seriously, is actively in the process of dying out.
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tielan
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