Send in the Robots? Is This the Answer to Low Fertility?

Joseph Chamie, former head of the UN Population Division, has posted a new article in which he lays out the case for (and, to be fair, also against) an increase in the use of robots in aging, low-fertility countries. This would be a way of getting around the need for bringing in immigrants to compensate for the lack of younger workers. Notice in the graph below that the current top countries in terms of robots per 100 workers are, in fact, countries that have strong issues with respect to immigrants.

High robot-to-worker ratios are found in South Korea, Japan and Germany (Figure 3). While more than half of the top ten countries in robot-to-worker ratios belong to the European Union, 75 percent of the world’s robots are geographically concentrated in five countries: China, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United States. The International Federation of Robotics forecasts that the number of industrial robots deployed worldwide will increase to around 2.6 million by 2019, which is nearly a doubling since 2015.

South Korea and Japan have long resisted immigrants, while Germany has a large Turkish-origin population that was originally recruited to help rebuild the country after WWII, but then the guest-workers stayed on--with social and political ramifications that the country is currently dealing with, as discussed in an article in this week's Economist. And, of course, the German resistance to allowing in Syrian and other refugees is the main reason why the EU is paying Turkey to "warehouse" them for the time being.

I haven't spent any time around robots, so it is hard for me personally to know how their widespread presence would alter human society. In my recent stay in the hospital here in San Diego, I was very aware and appreciative of the immigrant physicians and nurses who were keeping me alive. Not everyone can be replaced, in my opinion. Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that the large bulge in the aging population is a transition--not a permanent feature of human society. We need to get through this age transition, and change the way that society thinks about and prepares for the older ages, as I have discussed before.

Houston's Demographics Revealed by Hurricane Harvey

Who lives in Houston? A lot of people, to be sure, but until Hurricane Harvey hit, the city's demographics were not a regular topic of conversation, at least not among people with whom I associate. We know Houston as a city that evolved by annexing every piece of land it could and allowing growth to occur without much zoning or regulation. We also know it as a city that has attracted a lot of corporate headquarters. Economic and spatial growth and the creation of jobs have gone together in an almost unique way. An article in today's NYTimes notes that:

This city sprawls over 600 square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously. The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than 10,000 square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.

Yesterday, an article posted by NBCNews suggests that the population boom in Houston created a bigger disaster there than might otherwise have been the case:

When Hurricane Harvey slammed into Houston last week, it hit a city that is much bigger and more diverse than it was in 2000. Those changes made the storm’s impacts bigger and more complicated.

Growing immigrant populations and sprawling construction have remade the region and will likely make rebuilding efforts, which were never going to be easy, even more difficult.

Since 2000, Houston and surrounding Harris County have undergone a population explosion. Harris County has climbed from 3.4 million people to 4.6 million in 2016 — a 35 percent increase. As a point of comparison, the population of the United States as a whole has grown by about 15 percent since 2000.

Much of Harris County’s population is foreign-born — about 1.1 million people. Roughly 730,000 people are not U.S. citizens, according to Census data. Pew Research estimates that more than a half-million people in the Houston metro area are undocumented immigrants.

Along with that growth has come an increasing ethnic diversity in the population, as evidenced by the following graphic:

I conclude Chapter 9-- "The Urban Transition"--by looking at issues of urban sustainability. Houston is clearly putting urban sustainability to the test.

2020 Census Still in Limbo in the U.S.

It has been almost three months since I blogged about the serious financial difficulties facing the U.S. Census Bureau as it gears up for the 2020 Census. If you follow the Census Project blog, you will know that the situation remains dire, and the warning lights went on in this week's Economist, as well.

Spending usually rises greatly in the years before a census, to pay for testing and technology. But pending legislation would appropriate only $1.5bn for the 2018 fiscal year, nearly $300m less than needed, according to Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census expert. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has placed the 2020 census on its list of high-risk projects. Lack of funding has already caused the bureau to cancel two of its three “end-to-end” tests, as dress rehearsals are called. John Thompson, the agency’s director, unexpectedly left in June [as I noted at the time]; President Donald Trump has yet to nominate his replacement.

America’s census is an astounding, expensive event. In 2010 the Census Bureau amassed 550,000 temporary employees and spent $12.3bn trying to count every American resident. The GAO notes that costs have increased from $16 per household in 1970 to $92 in 2010. If an accurate tally is costly, though, an inaccurate one is probably more so.

Congress will return to work this week, and it is imperative that we all contact our members of Congress in both the House and Senate to remind them how important the Census is to the American economy and how foolishly cost-ineffective it is to not properly fund it. The Population Association of America has some good talking points to help you out on this important task.

Immigrants May Not Be Contributing Much to Spain's Fertility Levels

Until the 1970s, Spain had one of the highest fertility levels in Europe, with women bearing an average of nearly 3 children each. However, the bottom fell out in the 1970s and by the 1980s fertility had dropped below replacement level. Today fertility is very low--scarcely more than one child per woman--and so the question arises as to whether immigrants might provide a boost. A paper just out in Demographic Research by Amparo González-Ferrer, Teresa Castro-Martín, Elisabeth Katharina Kraus, and Tatiana Eremenko suggests that the answer might be no.

Now, to be sure, they offer evidence that immigration during the economic boom just before the Great Recession may have pushed Spanish fertility up a bit, but after the economic collapse many people left Spain because of the high rate of unemployment, and so the immigrant picture is different now than it was for that brief period of time.

In particular, their analysis of survey data suggests that most immigrant women mimic the Spanish pattern of significantly delaying the first birth--the average age at first birth in Spain is now in the low 30s. Women from Morocco are the only exception to this rule, and many of them are "traditional" wives who married a man who had previously migrated to Spain for work and then sought out a wife back home in Morocco.

Overall, the authors conclude that:

Although forecasting the future is beyond the scope of this paper, our findings challenge the widespread belief that immigrants’ childbearing alone will allow Spain to leave behind the current lowest-low and latest-late fertility scenario.

This suggests that it is not simply the case that migrants bring higher fertility with them to low fertility countries. The environment into which migrants are arriving and their own characteristics play important roles. Put another way, it might be incorrect to compare what is happening in the U.S. with what is happening in Spain.

Immigrants Continue to Contribute to the "Birthing" of America

Preface: I want to offer a deeply sincere "thank you" to everyone who supported me, directly and indirectly, through my recent near-death experience. I am very pleased to report that I am nearly back to full health, and I quite literally wouldn't be here without a lot of help from a lot of people. I am very appreciative! 

Now--back to business: In my last posting, exactly two months ago(!), I was noting that the birth rate in Switzerland was up, but in the U.S. it was down. Nonetheless, the birth rate in the U.S. is still higher than in Switzerland--hovering just below replacement level instead of being well below replacement level. Of course, as I point out in my text, and as I have often written in this blog, the U.S. birth rate would look more like Switzerland and other very low fertility countries were it not for the contribution of immigrants. Thanks to my long-time friend and colleague Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to an article in this week's Economist that uses data from Pew Research to remind us yet again of the demographic importance of immigration.

For decades America’s birth rate has been stuck below the level at which a given generation replaces itself. This means that without a steady influx of young migrants down the line there will be fewer working-age people supporting a greater number of retirees. But according to analysis published earlier this week by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, things would have been worse if it weren’t for immigrants. They make up 13% of the population but nearly a quarter of births in 2015 were to immigrant women.

This is happening all over the country, not just in a few select states like California, Texas, and Nevada, as you can in the graphic below:

Donald Trump's rhetoric against immigrants is not a new phenomenon, of course. His grandfather was an immigrant, but like so many people over the years, he wants to close the door behind his family of immigrants. And what happened to the birth rate the last time we slammed the door on immigrants back in the late 1920s? Yes, you remember--the birth rate dropped below replacement level and there was a lot of concern about depopulation in the United States. American became "great again" in the decades after World War II when we opened the door again to refugees and other immigrants.