Demographic Trends: A Warning to the Western World
A century ago big families were common in the Western world. Today the opposite is true. While the West fails to reproduce, third world countries have high birthrates. The result is a massive migration from the third world to the West.
by Melvin Rhodes
We were walking through the African bush talking.
I asked the elderly African man how many children he had, and he told me 54! "How many wives did you have?" was my next question. "Four," he replied. That still works out to over 13 children per wife.
That's quite a contrast to the West, where the average couple has less than two children. They need to have an average of 2.1 for a population to remain constant; fewer than two means the numbers are dropping. It's not surprising that many Western countries make up the difference by importing workers from the third world, including Africa.
My wife and I were in southwestern Ontario, Canada, in mid-July. We visited a family there who own an alpaca farm. They have one 14-year-old child, a boy. I asked him about his schooling. In the course of the conversation he mentioned that one of the local schools had recently closed due to falling enrollment.
He and his parents wonder where future farmers are going to come from, as the average age of people in the area is quite high. That same evening, the Canadian television news unsurprisingly highlighted the fact that Canada's population is aging. Without immigrants, it would be a lot higher.
The same day, our local newspaper in Michigan carried a front-page story asking the same question about the future of farming. The average age of farmers in Michigan is over 55. Few young people are interested in going into farming. The paper asked, Where will our food come from in the future?
It's not surprising, in the face of these changing demographics, that America's minority (nonwhite) population is now one third of the country's total population. Earlier this year the total population of the United States passed the 300 million mark. A few weeks later, it was announced that minorities number 100 million. Not so long ago, minorities, then mostly African-Americans, were about 12 percent of the total population.
