The UK has become one of the world’s most accepting places for foreign workers, according to a survey in 24 nations revealing a sharp increase in British acceptance of economic migration.


https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/23/uk-now-among-most-a...


Shortfall of 330,000 workers in UK due to Brexit, say thinktanks
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People in the UK emerged as less likely to think that when jobs are scarce employers should give priority to people of their own country than those in Norway, Canada, France, Spain, the US, Australia and Japan. Only Germany and Sweden were more open on that question.

In what the study’s authors described as “an extraordinary shift”, only 29% of people in the UK in 2022 said priority over jobs should go to local people, compared with 65% when the same question was asked in 2009.

The findings come as employers call for more migration to help fill more than 1m vacancies, and after the prime minister appointed the anti-immigration firebrand Lee Anderson as deputy chair of the Conservative party. He has called people arriving in small boats on the south coast “criminals” and called for them to be “sent back the same day”. Police have been deployed to hotels where asylum seekers are being housed amid violent protests by anti-immigration activists.

“It was unthinkable a decade ago that the UK would top any international league table for positive views of immigration,” said Prof Bobby Duffy, the director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, who shared the findings from the latest round of the survey exclusively with the Guardian and the BBC. “But that’s where we are now, with the UK the least likely, from a wide range of countries, to say we should place strict limits on immigration or prohibit it entirely.”

The UK ranked fourth out of 24 nations for the belief that immigrants have a very or quite good impact on the development of the country – ahead of Norway, Spain, the US and Sweden.

One factor in the shift in opinions on the question of “British jobs for British workers” may be that in 2009 the UK was in a deep recession, with more than double today’s unemployment, whereas today the economy suffers from a worker shortage, with 1.1m vacancies in the UK, 300,000 more than before the pandemic.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, last year urged employers to look to the British workforce in the first instance and “get local people”, although the government has widened visa programmes for seasonal workers and care staff.

Duffy said the findings showed that “it’s time to listen more carefully to public attitudes”. He said: “Politicians often misread public opinion on immigration. In the 2000s, Labour government rhetoric and policy on this issue was more relaxed than public preferences, and arguably they paid the price – but the current government is falling into the reverse trap.”

People in the UK are now the least likely of the 24 countries that participate in the World Values Survey study to think immigration increases unemployment, and second from top in thinking that immigrants fill important job vacancies.

They are very likely to say immigration boosts cultural diversity, and very unlikely to think immigration comes with crime and safety risks. However, more people in the UK think immigration leads to “social conflict” than in several other countries, including Canada, Japan and China.

Why Americans Are Having Fewer Babies - WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-americans-are-having-fewer-babies-...

The number of babies born in the U.S. started plummeting 15 years ago and hasn’t recovered since. What looked at first like a temporary lull triggered by the 2008 financial crisis has stretched into a prolonged fertility downturn. Provisional monthly figures show that there were about 3.66 million babies born in the U.S. last year, a decline of 15% since 2007, even though there are 9% more women in their prime childbearing years.

The decline has demographers puzzled and economists worried. America’s longstanding geopolitical advantages, they say, are underpinned by a robust pool of young people. Without them, the U.S. economy will be weighed down by a worsening shortage of workers who can fill jobs and pay into programs like Social Security that care for the elderly. At the heart of the falling birthrate is a central question: Do American women simply want fewer children? Or are life circumstances impeding them from having the children that they desire?


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To maintain current population levels, the total fertility rate—a snapshot of the average number of babies women have over their lifetime—must stay at a “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman. In 2021, the U.S. rate was 1.66. Had fertility rates stayed at their 2007 peak, the U.S. would now have 9.6 million more kids, according to Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.



Federal agencies are treating the slump like a temporary downturn. The Social Security Administration’s board of trustees projects that the total fertility rate will slowly climb to 2 by 2056 and hold there until the end of the century. Yet it’s been over a decade since fertility rates reached that level. Last year there were 2.8 workers for every Social Security recipient. That ratio is projected to shrink to 2.2 by 2045, roughly two-thirds what it was in 2000.



Some other developed countries are in a far deeper childbearing trough than the U.S. In South Korea, the total fertility rate hit a world record low of 0.84 in 2020 and has since sagged to 0.78. Italy’s rate slid to 1.24 last year. China’s population fell in 2022 for the first time in decades because its fertility rate has been far below the replacement rate for years. Its two-century reign as the world’s most populous country is expected to end this year when India overtakes it, if it hasn’t already.

In a recent note to clients, Neil Howe, a demographer at Hedgeye Risk Management, pointed to a World Bank report showing that the 2020s could be a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth, in large part because of worsening demographics. By 2026 or 2027, he wrote, the growth rate of the working-age population in the entire high-income and emerging-market world will turn from slightly positive to slightly negative, reversing a durable driver of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution.



This shift will make the U.S. more dependent on immigration to supply enough workers to keep the economy humming. Immigrants accounted for 80% of U.S. population growth last year, census figures show, up from 35% just over a decade ago. Yet the number of young immigrant women coming to the U.S. has diminished, Johnson said, and the decline in fertility has been greatest among Hispanics.

Having fewer children has already changed the social fabric of the country’s schools, neighborhoods and churches. J.P. De Gance, president and founder of Communio, a nonprofit that helps churches encourage marriage, said that lower marriage and birth rates are one of the largest drivers of the decline in religious affiliation that’s left pews empty across the country. That matters for the whole community, De Gance said, because churches give lonely people a place to form friendships, as well as feeding hungry people and running schools that fill gaps in public education. “When that’s diminished, the entire culture’s diminished,” he said.

Latest US Census Data Released in 2023

https://data.census.gov/table/ACSSPP1Y2022.S0201?q=S0201:+Selected+...

Pakistani-Americans Median Household Earning: $106,281, Mean Earnings: $149,178

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White Americans: Median household Income $78,636 Mean Earnings $112,415

African Americans : $52,238 $76,888

American Indian Alaska Native $61,778 $85,838

Asian Indian $152,341 $197,732

Bangladeshi $80,288 $116,500

Chinese $101,738 $160,049

Taiwanese $122,952 $180,906

Filipino $109,090 $122,635

Pakistanis $106,286 $149,178

Nepal $92,262 $120,146

Asians $104,646 $149,363