If you’d like to be on this Death of the West ping list, please FR mail me.
Posted on 01/06/2008 12:09:52 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
Britain is in the midst of a population boom that may be solving one pressing social and economic problem, but is creating several new ones, including a significant cultural issue.
Since the baby boom of the 1960s, British women had been giving birth to fewer and fewer babies so the country's birth rate had fallen well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother. This decline, coupled with longer life expectancies, had the United Kingdom entering the new millennium worried about dwindling numbers of workers available to support rising numbers of pensioners.
There were fears that pension plans would not have enough money and there wouldn't be enough taxpayers to pay the government's unfunded pension commitments. To reduce this feared demand, changes were made to retirement legislation to encourage people to stay at work instead of enjoying the retirements they had saved for.
Now, however, the surge in the birth rate, coupled with a related rise in immigration, has the country worried less about whether there will be enough workers to support its pensioners. Instead, the British are more concerned about who these workers will be and whether the country will have enough schools, hospitals and other public services to look after them and their children.
The concerns have been simmering for several years as the number of immigrants rose annually. In the last five years alone, more than a million immigrants settled in the U.K., mostly from south Asia and eastern Europe. Now, just over 10 per cent of British residents were born somewhere else, nearly twice as many as two decades ago. The phrase "asylum seeker" rapidly became the new slur as immigrants took jobs, filled school desks and hospital beds and piled further pressure onto services already straining to cope.
The concerns were further spurred on in December when the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed that more than 20 per cent of babies born in Britain last year were born to immigrant mothers. This is nearly double the percentage of a decade ago, a third more than five years ago, and the number looks like it will rise even more.
Mothers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India gave birth to five per cent of all babies born in the U.K. in 2006. Mothers from other European Union countries outside the British Isles, especially Poland, produced another four per cent of the new British babies.
Mothers from Pakistan give birth to an average of nearly five babies, while Bangladeshi mothers are producing four. These figures are triple the birth rate for mothers born and raised in the U.K. Looking a quarter of a century ahead, the ONS predicted that Britain's current population of about 60 million will rise by 10 million, and seven million of that increase will be people from somewhere else.
The influx of newcomers is raising emotional questions about what it means to be British, as "locals" become minorities in some parts of the country and British customs, attitudes and traditions run afoul of imported practices and beliefs. The standard British school uniform doesn't conform to Muslim dress requirements for girls. Polish immigrants expect Catholic churches to dispense far more than religious services. Traditional school nativity plays are now banned in many places and the politics, and political hostilities, of half a world away are now played out in British streets.
If you’d like to be on this Death of the West ping list, please FR mail me.
No mentions of mosques?
The Saudis will pay for the mosques.
Doesn’t this rubbish sound like the same BS being shoveled down our throats here?
Wow, France, the US, and Britain, are all “stabilizing” their populations!!!!!!
Gee, must be some kind of a gubmint miracle.
When are people going to wake up and smell the BS that they are walking in!
I prefer Mark Steyn’s book, “America Alone.” Mark is a far more witty, entertaining, elucidating author with a far greater creativity than good ole Pat — who, by the way, I certainly do admire.
Many British Muslims are on the government dole. What makes demographers think that their children are going to become taxpayers? We have four generations of welfare recipients in some US families, and our welfare system is not half as generous as the UK system.
Are the British powerless to stop immigration? Is anyone in control over there?
Likewise. An eye opening read.
While I loath the PC culture, I think the real problem is birthrates. America still sustains it's population. Europe has not been sustaining it's population for a while now. If they were to begin turning it around today they wouldn't see the benefits for at least 20 years.
The world is changing before our eyes. Europe is in decline and probably will not recover from it. Canada does not have a sustaining birth rate either and currently a large migration from Asia is off setting the native born reduction.
Canada is likely to be stronger with wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong.
bttt
It repays taking a closer look at the ONS figures before leaping to such apocalyptic conclusions. 5% of births from South Asia, 4% from Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Ever met a Polish Muslim? And remember also that a healthy proportion of the South Asian immigrants has always been Hindu, Sikh and to a lesser extent Buddhist. Polish Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists...... none of them exactly friendly to Islam (indeed usually considerably more unfriendly to Islam than the apathetic English WASP majority), yet together pretty closely counterbalancing the numbers of Muslim births. There are still many different ways in which these rapid population changes could play out in the medium term, and I'm not too impressed by assertions that there can only be one outcome.
Political Correctness is one of the most powerful tools ever created by the left. Once upon a time, Marxism was advanced via economic and military force. Those things, while very threatening, could be combatted. Marxist economies invariably collapsed, and Ronald Reagan demonstrated that Marxist military might could be forced down.
But PC is psychological intimidation. It’s a slow brainwashing combined with “soft totalitarian” enforcement mechanisms. All you have to do is look at any conservative website, including here at FreeRepublic, to see how successful PC is.
Here’s just one recent example. I’m not a Huckabee supporter by any means, but when it was reported that he had signed a Christian document endorsing the husband’s leadership role in the family, the PC element here became furious. It was astonishing how many Freepers went ballistic, repeating every feminist mantra about wife beating, keeping women chained to the cook stove, etc. Soon, we were hearing that Huckabee was a “sexist” and no different than the Taliban. PC is so deeply imprinted into our culture that it’s only with difficulty that we can think outside the box.
And PC is never pushed intellectually. It’s emotional psych-ops. Anyone trying to defend importing a zillion Muslims into Britain using logic would fall flat on their faces. If the British voters had been asked back in 1968 whether or not to permit Muslims to move in, they’d have voted no. But that’s not how PC operates. Anyone suggesting that large scale Muslim immigration isn’t good is simply shouted down with howls of “racism”, “intolerance”, “xenopobia”, and so on. People will then rush out and announce that “diversity is our strength” and talk about how horrible things were back in the 1950s when Britain was “lily white”. Anyone questioning PC risks losing his job, and in some cases could even be placed under investigation by a hate crimes unit.
It is not just birth rates. They are also moving there in droves.
They are also moving here in droves. There are many Iraqi refugees just waiting to get into the US. We will be facing the same problems that Europe has.
Evidence of the current rate?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.