In response to Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Isabel V. Sawhill argues that “we don’t need more babies; we just need more immigrants”:
Expecting women to rededicate themselves to producing children is not in the cards, even with the kind of family-friendly policies that Last and some others support. One only has to look at what is going on in Europe where such policies have been tried at great expense to see that they are not likely to be very effective.
Last counters:
I go to great lengths in the book to detail how vital immigration has been, and continues to be, to our demographic profile. I also discuss its limits. For instance, while immigration provides a great deal of demographic relief it is, as an objective technical matter, inferior to baby-making in that it does not provide the same rejuvenation effect on a society’s age profile. For a deeper exploration of the math on this, I’d point readers to Carl Schmertmann’s work. I would have thought that Sawhill might at least acknowledge some of these limitations in the course of making her broader argument.
The Dish 