Their main fiscal challenge isn’t immigrants, or working-age people on the dole, it’s the inexorable increase in the percentage of the population over the retirement age. And that’s a problem everyone on earth has or soon will.

That’s too ludicrous for words; it’s bass-ackwards. The correlation is precisely the opposite. More money, fewer babies.

Algeria has a per-capita income of about $8,000.00 and a TFR of 1.82

Niger has a per-capita income of $700.00 and a TFR of 7.29

In other words, Algerians have 11x times as much money each and have 4x fewer children each.

They have fewer children not because of economic problems, but because they -want- fewer children. Because they’re literate and mostly city-dwellers, and the inhabitants of Niger are illiterate subsistence peasants and nomads.

As it happens, I don’t like those people much either, but I’m not going to let it drive me into revenge-fantasy-land.

On current trends, Muslims will never, ever be anything but a smallish minority in any European country except Albania — which has been mostly (70%) Muslim for centuries. In 50 years, there will be fewer French and Germans and Italians than there are now — and also fewer Algerians and Turks and Iranians and Tunisians and probably fewer Arabs in general; certainly they’ll be past their peak numbers by then.(**)

So the Eurabia meme is total fantasy. Not that it doesn’t get lots of mileage, but why should that be a surprise? There are still people who believe in Marxist economic planning, after all, not to mention elves.

Look, Muslims don’t have a special demograpic pattern. They react to modernity just the way other people do: they stop breeding fast.

The reason birth-rates are dropping _everywhere_ is the same reason, _everywhere_.

That’s a logical necessity; otherwise, we’d have 223 different countries all undergoing the same demographic transition for 223 different reasons, just accidentally happening at the same time, making it the biggest coincidence in the history of the universe, roughly equivalent to someone dropping through solid rock because all the molecules happened to move just right by sheer chance.

This is not some contingent accident which might reverse tomorrow; it’s part of the “long-term trend” of modernity.

“Modernity” is how you’d sum it up. Modern = Low Fertility. Very Poor And Backward = High Fertility.

Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, animist, black, white, brown, it just doesn’t matter. The timing and precise details vary from country to country (and between groups within countries) but the underlying causes are _completely uniform worldwide_.

This is not a hypothesis.

It’s not even a theory, except in the scientific sense of the word.

It’s a demonstrable fact. Go look up the numbers; the CIA World Factbook is the best source. Look under “TFR”, for Total Fertility Rate, the number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, in the Rank Order tables.

2.1 is the magic replacement level TFR, at which a population with a first-world level of mortality will remain stable; anything below 2.1 means an (eventual) decline. Add a few .1′s for a third-world population with higher mortality. The US currently has a TFR of precisely 2.1

The world TFR is currently 2.58, down from over 6 in the 1960′s. By way of comparison, less than 10 countries in the entire world are now at 6 or more, and none of them are very large. The two biggest countries in the world, China and India, are at 1.7 and 2.7, respectively.

Now — remembering that the overwhelming majority of People of Muslim Background (PMB’s) in Europe come from the Maghreb, Turkey and Iran, take note of the following TFR’s, as of 2008:

Turkey: 1.87 children per woman
Iran: 1.71 (only marginally higher than Sweden)
Tunisia: 1.73 (lower than Norway)
Algeria: 1.82 (lower than France)
Morocco: 2.57

Oh, and Albania — 2.02

So all these countries will have fewer and fewer babies born each year, and their median ages will steadily increase. This is absolutely inevitable.

What else do all these countries have in common, demographically speaking?

Well, they all had _much higher_ birthrates until _quite recently_. They dropped in a generation a distance that took us centuries.

Morocco was at 8 children per woman about 20 years ago, higher than _any country in the world_ today, and about where the US was in 1776. Now it has a lower birth-rate than Israel.

Iran was at nearly 7, which would put it in the top 10 today, along with African cesspits like Mali and Burundi. Now it would fit right in in Scandinavia, demographically speaking.

This is a much more rapid decrease than the Western countries, where TFR’s started drifting down a long, long time ago and were never that high.

In other words, the birth-rates in the relevant Muslim countries _have_ dropped(*), and are _continuing_ to drop, just like everyone else’s.

Nor is there any reason they won’t continue to do so, down to between 1 and 1.3, which seems to be more or less the lowest you can get. At least so far — that’s the rate for urban Chinese, Italians and Koreans, the least fertile people on the planet.

Morocco is falling so fast that it’s hard to keep track; the Moroccan government figures list their TFR at about 2.3 as of this year, which is probably more recent than the CIA estimate, which can lag a couple of years. The CIA had them dropping from 2.67 to 2.57 between 2007 and 2008.

PMB’s in Europe have been following exactly the same pattern, with fertility rates that tend to track those of the locals, and the correspondence increases with length of residence. PMB’s born in Europe can’t be statistically distinguished from the locals, allowing for socioeconomic status.

The social environment which produces low fertility among Europeans does precisely the same to anyone else who lives there.

How could it not? If you put someone in a big city, give them a TV, and/or teach them to read and write, their birthrate drops. It’s automatic, like pulling on a rope. Putting them in a _European_ city just accelerates the process.

This “normalization” in Europe applies both to fertility and to other types of reproductive behavior. Eg., about 1/3 of all births to women of Muslim background in France are illegitimate — something inconceivable in a Middle Eastern country, and which tells you a great deal.

Yeah, there are “honor killings”… but not 1/3 of the mothers, you betcha. And those weren’t virgin births, either; each one involved a Muslim (or “Muslim”) woman screwing. They weren’t killed for it.

Honor killings and that sort of things are sociological relics. (They used to happen among Sicilians and Spaniards, too; ’twas a pan-Mediterranean thing.) They’re a “lag”, like the odd Muslim mother in 2008 France with 13 children, so beloved of Mr. Steyn. Yes, they exist. No, there aren’t enough of them to mean anything.

There’s a reason “anecdotal evidence” is a polite scholarly term which translates into plain English as “worthless” and “meaningless”. If you want to know how large groups of people are acting and will probably act, you have to look at statistics, and do so very, very carefully.

Eg., immigrants of Muslim background in Europe _start out_ with a somewhat higher TFRs than those of their countries of origin; they do so for exactly the same reason that Mexican immigrants in California have a higher TFR (2.6) than that of Mexico (2.34).

National TFR’s are calculated… well, nationally.

For example, the “American” TFR is precisely 2.10 as of 2008 — exactly the replacement level, up fractionally from 2.09 in 2007.

That averages regional, ethnic and (more significantly) class and educational differences. For example, white yuppies in Vermont have a very different TFR (about 1.5-1.6) than small-town white people in Idaho (about 2.5-2.6, an entire child higher, more than 50%).

Puerto Ricans (1.7) and Cuban-Americans (1.6) have a very different TFR than Mexican-Americans (2.6-ish and up, depending on definitions.)

Immigrants from a 3rd-world country typically are poorer, less educated, and more rural than the average of the total population of the country they come from.

Fertility decline _always_ starts in big cities among the upper middle class, and then spreads out and down.

It doesn’t become even relatively uniform nationwide until the change has worked its way through the whole social organism, as people change their reference groups for social behaviors. This caused widespread eugenic panic in, for example, the UK in the early 20th century — data showed that lawyers and teachers had miniscule TFR’s compared to coal miners and laborers. As with most ‘moral panics’, the figures proved to be strictly temporary.

Likewise, Tunisians in France didn’t come from the upper-middle-class of Tunis or Sfax. They were more likely to be peasants or first-generation peasant migrants, working to lower-middle class, and originally from the hinterlands though often staging through the bigger cities.

The upper-class urban/lower-class rural cline is precisely how fertility decline happened in the US, which in 1776 had a higher TFR than Mali does today — it started among the elites in the cities of New England in the 1780′s, and then drifted slowly and irregularly down until the 1930′s (when it was lower than it is now) and has since fluctated at a level that’s low absolutely but rather high for a 1st-world country.

These days it happens more quickly, but the pattern is always the same; highly-educated big-city folks first, the rest following.

Now, what countries still have -high- TFR’s?

Look at the 10 highest in the world, starting with Mali at 7.34, and ending with Angola at 6.20.

What do they have in common?

Some are mostly Christian (Uganda, Angola), some mostly Muslim (Niger, Mali). Some are in Asia (2, Afghanistan and Yemen) and the rest in Africa (8).

What they have in common is that they are all -extremely poor and isolated-. Not just poor — plenty of poor countries have low TFR’s now; Ceylon isn’t exactly affluent — but _very_ poor, and isolated in the sense that most of their populations are cut off from contact with the world media environment, unable to afford TV’s or DVD players.

They are relatively “un-modern”. Large chunks of Niger or Angola live lives not much different from their great-grandparents.

(Angola has a lot of oil, but for various reasons it hasn’t affected most of the population at all, and the post-independence civil wars mean that most of the country is more isolated and backward than it was in the 1970′s.)

But even here among the top 10, TFR’s are lower than they were. Remember, 20 years ago Morocco was over 8; when I was born in the 1950′s, the world level was around 6, which is equivalent to Angola today.

The “natural” level, given early universal marriage and no contraception, is around 9 or a bit higher.

No country in the world is now at 8 or more; a generation ago, dozens were. Modernity penetrates more easily as communications improve. Even poor African countries are increasingly urbanized; they get cell phones, they get DVD players, they get satellite TV. Then they stop having so many babies.

The same pattern applies to the rest of the Muslim world. Yemen and Afghanistan and Mali are outliers; very poor, very isolated.

Most Muslims now live in areas with middling to lowish fertility (Indonesia is at 2.34, for example; Bahrein at 2.52, etc.) and dropping fast. More than half the world’s Muslims now live in areas at or around the world average.

Even those which are affluent but which made fairly strong efforts at insulating their populations from modernity (or Westernization, which is about the same thing) have decreasing TFR’s; it just took a little longer.

Iran’s the most obvious example; it now has the same fertility levels as most northern or western European countries, whereas in the 1980′s its birth-rates were _six times_ those of the same area. It’s jaw-droppingly rapid, compressing the transition into a mere decade or so, since the decline really got under way in the 1990′s.

Saudi Arabia tries even harder to keep out “corruption”, and started out more backward; its TFR was at 8 quite recently. It is now at 3.89 — and was over 4 as recently as 2007. It’s falling at about 0.15 child per year and accelerating. That’ll put it below replacement level in the 2010′s, sometime.

Pakistan was also over 4 in 2005; it’s now at 3.58.

Syria was at 3.8 or so; now it’s 3.2. Jordan was over 5 at the beginning of this decade; it’s now at 2.47

And so forth and so on.

On current trends the _world_ TFR will drop below 2.1 fairly soon. The only large group in the entire world whose TFR _isn’t_ dropping are Americans. Theirs has been increasing — very slightly — for the past generation.

So you can relax. The lustful Turks are not coming for the blond women anytime soon, nor will the Crescent go up on St. Peter’s or Notre Dame.

If you want to worry, worry about the consequences of an aging, declining population worldwide.

(*) when you confront Steyn with the numbers, which I’ve done, he invariably responds with “well, maybe Muslim birth-rates will drop in the future, but that’ll be too late”, and starts comparing Niger to Latvia. When you point out that they ALREADY HAVE DROPPED, he either gets insulting or just refuses to answer because it contradicts his favored narrative. This is not the sign of someone who’s arguing honestly.

(**) “demographic intertia” can keep a population growing for a while after the TFR drops below 2.1, particuarly if the birth-rate was much higher until recently. Women start having children well after they’re born, of course, so the smaller families of more numerous women born at the earlier TFR’s can keep raw numbers drifting up for a while, depending also on how _much_ the TFR drops below 2.1. 1.2 stops growth a lot faster than 1.99. Represented in graphic form, a previously high TFR which suddenly drops looks like a bulge going through a snake.

Eg., China is still growing at about 0.4% annually, despite its TFR having dropped below replacement level in the late 1980′s. But once it’s below 2.1, every new birth cohort contains fewer potential mothers than the one before — so the rise halts, and then inexorably begins to fall; the median age of the population begins to rise well before the actual overall drop in numbers starts. The increase in population is all at the higher age-groups, in other words. The population “pyramid” is then biggest at the top and smallest at the bottom — a pyramid standing on its head.

In the Chinese case, and in some Muslim areas, things are made worse by the sexual imbalance — 130 boys for every 100 women born in China, and similar figures in parts of Pakistan. Only women have children, so that’s the same long-term breeding potential as a much smaller balanced birth cohort. Effectively, 30 men can’t reproduce.

Your account at LGF has been unblocked. We (I) would very much like to continue our discussion there.

CARRY
ON,
R