Reflections on 'replacement migration'

‘With their birth rates low enough for long enough, a number of countries, mostly European, face the likelihood of a lengthy period of decreasing population’. A recent UN report calculates the migrant intake required to hold their populations constant — what it terms replacement migration. The implication, perhaps unintended, is that such constancy should be a policy objective with immigration the principal instrument. Privileging demography in this way, however, is hard to defend. There are social limits to immigration in terms of the acceptable proportion of migrants among total recruits to a society (births plus migrants) which may come into play well short of full replacement. The relevant economic issues in considering migration have more to do with trade pacts and human capital than with domestic market size and human numbers. And environmental quality might benefit from a smaller population. For many countries migration is likely to be only a small part of the complex array of responses to persistent low fertility