There is a simply amazing piece written by Mark Steyn over at Opinion Journal that sets things straight as to the real future of the world. It is a very long read that covers liberalism, Islam, demographics, immigration, self hate and the impact these will have.
He also goes into one of my pet peeves which is military presence in Europe and how it has coddled the Europeans into not having to defend themselves. It's turned them into mass nanny states who always expect the US to save their country and then return it to them -- ala France -- should anything really ugly happen. This has allowed them to turn into social governments that are collapsing under their own weight.
... Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.
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"Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%.
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Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
Mass immigration to fill the holes of a declining birthrate is going to have a huge effect on countries in the future. Those who do not defend themselves from the happy invasion of immigration will fall by the wayside and be added to the bonfire of failed civilizations.
