Politicians riding the anti-migration bandwagon are prone to say, “Our country can’t take any more people”. Do they really mean to say that there are too many people already, and we must bring our population down?
Given that people can generate as well as consume resources, it cannot be assumed that simply reducing the population is a good thing. Some might try to argue that there is an optimum level where the population size is just right and any increase would have terrible effects. But what is this level, and are we anywhere near it?
Take the UK for example. On all the evidence, we need more, not fewer people to keep the country going. We have an ageing population that requires more people than we have at the moment to support them. We have labour shortages in many areas causing problems in service, production, and distribution in a range of sectors. The birth rate is in decline which means young recruits will be increasingly difficult to find in the coming years.
Do the ‘Our Country is Full’ brigade want us nonetheless to stop any addition to the population? Are they going to campaign for total birth control? Is ‘No More Babies’ going to be their next electoral slogan?
The UK birth rate has already dropped in 2022 to 11.322 per 1,000 (the lowest level since 2002), giving an overall level of new births of 764,325 (based on population estimate of 67.508 million – Office for National Statistics). While the ONS estimated that net migration to the UK was 745,000 in 2022, its projections point to that figure falling to just 245,000 per year [Note 1].
With fewer and fewer people to fill critical job vacancies, to drive economic growth, to care for the frail and ageing, to produce innovations, to make purchases that keep shops and factories open, to pay taxes – the future is bleak rather than rosy.
Against this backdrop, with all the relentless talk of ‘we have too many mouths to feed as it is’, it won’t be surprising if the birth rate goes down even further. The only salvation left is people coming to this country, migrants who want to make a better life by working hard and contributing more. While the native new born will need to be nurtured for 16-18 more years before they can play their part in serving society, new arrivals are predominantly adults with ready skills and determination to prove themselves socially and economically worthy.
Far from trying to devise all kinds of deterrent to put people off from joining us, we should be encouraging them to make their home here and enrich our country in financial and cultural terms. People who work in food production give us more nourishment than they consume. People who work in IT development help to advance our technology rather than set it back. To suggest that migrants coming to work are depleting what we have is to flip truth on its head.
But what about the ‘warning’ that we are too over-crowded to accommodate any more people? It conjures up the image of a land with no space left. Yet nothing could be more misleading. Barely 12% of land in the UK is developed with homes, other buildings, roads, and urban green space. That leaves 88% for everything else (agriculture, forests, lakes and rivers, etc) [Note 2], much of which is owned by a tiny minority of people – indeed, half of all the land in the UK is controlled by just 25,000 very rich landowners [Note 3] – that’s about 0.03% of our population. If only some of these landowners would allow a fraction of their holdings to be used for housing that people can afford, everyone in the country could have a spacious home.
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Note 1: The Migration Observatory (University of Oxford): https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/reports/why-are-the-latest-net-migration-figures-not-a-reliable-guide-to-future-trends/
Note 2: Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/ukenvironmentalaccounts/2014-07-02#land-use-experimental
Note 3: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author
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