Well how much have the countries aged? In that case you should expect it to go up, maybe it's still a lot less than it should be.
I'm a statistician. That (first) graph is a case study in how to lie with statistics. They should teach it in class.
I'm out, I recommend you spend some time reading about this issue. Inequality and welfare cuts leading to the rise in the far right is fairly well established. One (misleading) graph doesn't disprove it. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
Taking in immigrants is a short term solution. Within one generation their fertility rate drops to match the local one. Which means you have to keep bringing in new ones. That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor. And unless you are pulling from Africa or a couple middle eastern countries, the source of immigration is also declining in population at this point so it isn't a permanent fix.
That said, the fix doesn't need to be permanent. The deceleration of fertility rates is the problem, not the velocity simply being negative. Japan is almost through their problem, as they started it first. Soon they will be on a constant downward slope. Which can be handled by productivity gains. Trying to use unlimited immigration to handle the deceleration bump will create more issues than it solves. Unless maybe if you are China... Their deceleration looks like a sharp edged cliff instead of a hill. Their productivity gains are also very non linear, so maybe that will make it less horrible.
> That means there is never time to integrate, leading to cultural clashes and second class labor.
That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The problem is the safety nets broke down, eg minimum wage hasn't kept up with anything. Or housing/college/healthcare pricing has gone up much faster than income. When people feel insecure they have a tendency to go racist and blame outsiders. If we fixed those, nobody would care about 1 or 2 Somalis in their high school.
It is a far right talking point, or just right now I guess? But it also is a reasonable one. Not from the blood and soil only Europeans are American standpoint, but from the standpoint of having an increasing percentage of first generation immigrants. Japan has seen issues with this at the same time they have benefitted from it. It isn't a matter of blaming the immigrants, it is a disservice to them too. We can't welcome them properly at the rates that would be necessary to fully offset fertility decline. That doesn't mean we shouldn't allow any immigration at all. We should do it as quickly as we can do it correctly. And that would be true even without the demographic problem. Having one or two immigrants in a school is probably too low, we can go faster than that. Having half the class be new from varying places doesn't work. It is also a problem for the donating countries. South America can't afford for all their working age people to head to Spain, they are already hitting their own demographic decline. Africa is on the other side still. They have too many children relative to the working age population. Taking only working age men and not their children harms Africa in a similar way.
I'm not saying allowing immigration in a steady controlled fashion won't help, just that it won't be enough, and that the levels that would be enough aren't possible without impacts on the immigrants, their new countries, and their originating countries being severe enough they don't balance.
Right now the US has 4.1% of its population residing unlawfully. That is 8-20x any European nation. It is largely due to the federated system and a suspicion of national identity systems, but just being able to bring in the rate we have been, but correctly through the system would be a start.
> That's a far-right talking point. It's not true. The US has been wholesale importing immigrants for a long time and benefiting greatly from it.
The last time the foreign born population was at the level it is today, the U.S. enacted restrictive immigration policies for 45 years and instituted aggressive measures to assimilate immigrants.
I’m citing a fact that’s plain in the data. Germany, the UK, and Italy spend slightly more of a larger economy on social welfare than they did in 2000. If you have a contrary case based on different data, then make it. We’re intelligent people here, we don’t need to resort to appeals to authority, especially in a subject like political sentiment that isn’t amenable to expert analysis. This stuff isn’t rocket science.
I'm not having this conversation. It's like creationism or anti-vaccine. You can solve this YOURSELF in 10 seconds by googling "UK austerity" or "Germany austerity" but instead you just want to argue from ignorance. Get informed first.
I'm a statistician. That (first) graph is a case study in how to lie with statistics. They should teach it in class.
I'm out, I recommend you spend some time reading about this issue. Inequality and welfare cuts leading to the rise in the far right is fairly well established. One (misleading) graph doesn't disprove it. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...