The forgotten UN report on “Replacement Migration”.

One of the terms that is certain to have you pegged as a conspiracy theorist if you ever happen to throw it in as an icebreaker at an evening soirée is ‘Replacement Migration.’. Tickets for the Aviva or Bohs might disappear, sharpish.  

It is particularly associated with Renaud Camus who published a book Le Grand Remplacement, The Great Replacement, in 2011. As with many so-called trigger words it is the term itself, rather than the substance of the argument, which attracts outrage and avoids discussion of the substance.

Even where a person does not use the term, nor agree with Camus’ theory behind it, reference to  evidence of radical demographic changes in Europe will generally be seized upon as proof that even someone who refers solely to official population statistics belongs over into the corner with tin foiled coiffured Q Anon types.

It may come as a surprise then that the concept of population replacement did not originate with Camus and that in March 2000, the Population Division of the United Nations Secretariat published a report entitled Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations? 

The object of the exercise was to examine various scenarios and to estimate “what levels of 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.” The focus of the study was Europe, Japan, Russia, the United States and South Korea.

The central scenario posed was what level of migration would be needed to ensure that the working age populations in 2050 would remain the same as in 2000.  That was regarded as the minimum to ensure the maintenance of productivity and public provision.

In the situation where almost all of the countries concerned were expected to experience continued falls in fertility the level of projected migration was accepted to be “extraordinarily high.” They are no longer regarded as such.

Interestingly, given the accepted narrative here that large scale immigration is required to offset aging and “pay the pensions” of elderly natives, the report refers to studies which found that  “immigration is not a realistic solution to demographic ageing” for the simple and logical reason that evidence suggested that “immigrants adopt the low fertility of a host population.” (p10.) …