by Paul Morland
These advances were already well under way in the more advanced countries of Europe well before the Second World War. The poor described by George Orwell in the 1930s ‘in their row after row of little grey slum houses’, however hard their lot, enjoyed a much higher level of material prosperity and longer lives than their ancestors portrayed by Charles Dickens. Their health was better, their life expectancy longer, they had fewer children and those they did have were much more likely to survive into adulthood. The process was extended after 1945 across the West: housing improved, education improved (almost always associated with longer life expectancy), and incomes and living standards rose across the board; finally, universal free or subsidised health care became the norm.
The most frequently used measures of a society’s age look at its life expectancy at birth and its median age. US life expectancy rose from a little short of seventy to a little short of eighty between 1950 and 2010. Europe’s record has been more impressive still. A number of European countries, such as France, Austria and Belgium, starting in 1950 with life expectancy not much above sixty-five have now surpassed eighty. The greater provision of the European welfare state and socialised health care, whatever else may be said for or against it, and perhaps healthier diets and lifestyles, have meant that the average west European outlives the average American by a couple of years.25
As in the United States, so in Europe lengthening life expectancy by a decade or more since 1950 has to some extent helped to offset the impact of slowing population growth–or even population decline–which would have resulted from falling fertility alone. The consistent lengthening of life expectancy has in recent years become patchy in the West; there are sub-groups in the US, for example–specifically lower-class white men–where it has ground to a halt or even slightly reversed itself. There was a very slight reduction in US life expectancy between 2014 and 2015, the result of drugs, alcoholism and what are known as ‘diseases of despair’.26 Widespread and growing obesity is not helping either. It is too early to say whether such a reverse will become significant, widespread and long lasting. It seems unlikely–the inexorable march to longer and longer life expectancy is so often thought of as an absolute given of demography–but once again, the human tide could be about to take an unexpected turn.
The general lengthening of life–even if there have been some recent small reversals–and fall in birth rates has meant that Western societies have aged, as can been seen from the median age. Whereas the median age in the United States from 1950 to 2015 went from thirty to thirty-eight, the rise was sharper in many European countries, which have experienced a sharper rise in life expectancy and a sharper drop in birth rates. In Spain, for example, it rose from twenty-eight to forty-three and in Italy from under twenty-nine to forty-six. In Germany too it has reached forty-six, the world’s highest along with Japan. Probably for the first time in history, societies are emerging which are middle-aged and growing old. Today the average German–with decades of life ahead of him or her–has reached an age by which his or her great-grandparents could at birth have expected to be dead. Spaniards, Italians and most other people in the West are in a similar position.
Longer life expectancy and a higher median age are in many ways to be welcomed. People want to live longer, so it should be recognised that when on average they do, it is a good thing, enriching lives and opening opportunities and vistas for changes in work and for leisure once unimaginable for most people. Whole industries, such as leisure cruising, have grown up to give those in retirement adventures and experiences that their grandparents could only have dreamed of. What was once viewed with terror–growing old and sick and dependent on others–has become for many a golden sunset. The gains are social, not just individual. Older populations tend to be more peaceful and the societies in which they predominate are less crime-ridden, compensations perhaps for a reduction in the energy and creativity which comes with youth.
There is a proven link between ageing societies and falling crime, and crime rates have indeed fallen over the last few decades across much of the Western world. But there are two main and related concerns. The first is that an increase in the elderly population will give rise to an increase in the need for personal and health care that will over-tax the manpower resources of societies in which it is occurring. This became a central issue during the UK election campaign of 2017, when Prime Minister Theresa May proposed reforms to the current systems of social care and was then forced to back down, crucially losing her reputation for being ‘strong and stable’. A lack of young people locally to meet these needs is likely to give rise to demands for further immigration, with further consequences to follow. Immigration is in any case probably only a temporary palliative for ageing; immigrant populations age and the flow of young people will dry up well beyond Europe. Besides, there is no reason to think that Europe will forever have the economic clout to draw in young immigrants from beyond its shores, even if it wanted to.
The second concern related to ageing is that where the elderly receive generous state benefits in retirement, these will be increasingly difficult for a shrinking workforce to bear. When, in 1889, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck first introduced old-age pensions for German workers living beyond the age of seventy, the chances of ever benefitting from them were slim. German life expectancy at the time was well short of fifty, so a worker living beyond the age of seventy was a lucky and fairly rare individual. What was put in place was real insurance–specifically, insurance against the poor living too long. Retirement ages since then have come down while life expectancies have soared, and this has placed intense pressure on the intergenerational compact which underpins the welfare state in many European countries. With a large ratio of young workers to the dependent elderly, as was the case in the early years of the welfare state, it was not difficult to finance old-age provision through transfer payments, even if they decreasingly resembled genuine insurance (since most expected eventually to enjoy their rewards).
This changes as more and more people live well beyond retirement age and the pool of young workers dries up. In order to stabilise government pensions spend as a share of GDP, it is estimated that benefits would have to be reduced by more than one-third in Germany and by over 40% in the Netherlands and the US. The alternative would be to increase the retirement age, by as much as seven years in the Netherlands for example.27 Either of these options or a combination of them will be politically difficult, but with many European states already heavily indebted, it is not obvious that governments will for long have the option to postpone the problem by increasing debt. The spectre of poverty in old age and state bankruptcy is haunting Europe, with the United States not far behind.
The Mexican Wave
With persistently low birth rates and an insatiable appetite for labour, the developed countries of Europe and North America have hoovered up populations from the developing world over the past decades. Immigrants have come from societies with booming fertility–as we will see later–and in many such countries the departure of thousands of people has not prevented their own populations from growing rapidly. Culturally and demographically, the impact has been greater on the receiving rather than the sending nation, not only preventing what would otherwise have been plummeting labour-force numbers in the host nation but also changing its ethnic complexion. In the case of the United States, the bulk of that immigration has come from Latin America and in particular, at least until recently, from its immediate southern neighbour, Mexico.
In the 1920s, when immigration controls were imposed in the US, the debate in Congress made it quite transparent that the objective was to ‘defend America’s white majority’, to keep America as white and as Anglo-Saxon as possible, with as few as possible coming from southern or eastern Europe and ideally none at all from anywhere in Asia or Africa, and for the ensuing forty years this was the view informing US immigration policy. Then in the mid 1960s, along with the liberalisation of views on families and the role of women, a cha
nge in attitudes to race meant a complete overturning of US immigration law. Suddenly the gates were open again and this time those best positioned to take advantage were not those from the British Isles or Western Europe (they were enjoying their own post-war economic boom), nor those from eastern Europe (they were locked in the Soviet empire), but those to the US’s immediate south, the poor of Latin America and particularly Mexico, their numbers swelling through their own demographic transition and the tantalising prospects of the American dream just a river away. Conveniently, this coincided with the nosedive in the US fertility rate.
America’s population continued to expand towards 300 million (and beyond), but now this growth was driven upward not by the arrival of the huddled masses from Europe at Staten Island, nor by arrivals in the maternity wards, but rather by arrivals from over the Rio Grande, from Mexico and other Latin American countries and, to a lesser extent, from Asia. Today’s America has been shaped by the choices of people since the 1960s to have fewer children and by big shifts in social attitudes to race, as a result of which the doors were opened wide to non-European immigration. People from across the world were eager to take advantage of the opportunity and embrace the American dream.
There was already a Mexican population in place when the US annexed what was then the northern half of Mexico in 1848, although it was probably not much greater than 100,000 and many of these left.28 Yet despite this and the repatriation and deportations of the depression era, the Mexican population grew steadily, and by 1970 the census showed over 9 million Latinos in the US, of whom around half were Mexican.29 At this stage the number began to rise sharply: by 1973 there were already 6 or 7 million Mexicans in the country. By 1980 there were nearly 15 million Hispanics, representing more than 6% of the population, of which around 60% were Mexicans, the next largest group being Puerto Ricans (15%) and Cubans (12%). The latter were given open immigration rights as part of the government’s anti-Castro policy.30 Growth continued well into the twenty-first century. According to the 2010 census, Hispanics as a whole were over 16% of the population, outstripping the traditional largest minority, blacks, who comprised below 14%, while at 50 million, Latinos, two-thirds of whom are now Mexican or of Mexican origin, had grown more than fivefold in forty years; those self-identifying as fully white were now below two-thirds of the total and as fully or partly white little more than three-quarters.31
While most of the growth of the Latino population since the 1960s was driven by immigration, it was also partly ‘natural’: with a young demographic profile and high fertility, the Hispanic birth rate was half as high again as that of whites and for Mexicans in particular higher still.32 Indeed, in the early twenty-first century, with immigration slowing, births to Mexicans in the US outstripped arrivals of Mexicans.33 This great migration to the US may not have been as large in relative terms as the migration at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: back then, the foreign-born population of the US peaked at around 14% while in the late 1990s it was around 8%.34 However, in absolute terms it has been the largest inflow the country has experienced. Furthermore, it made the US by far the largest global recipient of migrants.35
Yet there are signs that the great Mexican inflow into the United States is abating. Just as demography and economics drove migrants inward, so improvements in the Mexican economy and sharply falling fertility rates in Mexico (now not much above replacement level) and associated falling population growth–nearly two-thirds down on its peak level–have reduced the flow out of Mexico. At the same time the post-2008 economic downturn in the United States has reduced the demand for cheap labour, which many of the latest Mexican arrivals were satisfying, and one estimate suggests that from 2010 there were half a million fewer Mexicans in the United States than in 2007.36
The changing complexion of the new America was nowhere more dramatic than in California, where the share of the population classified as white European fell from 70% to 40% in the thirty years from 1980 to 2010. This shifting ethnic demography has had political consequences of two sorts. First, the minority vote has come to matter more as it has grown. Second, the still dominant white vote has to some extent reflected a backlash against rapid ethno-demographic change. Based on the white vote alone–which was still dominant until quite recently–Barack Obama would not have become president in 2009. Meanwhile, many see Donald Trump’s emergence and triumph as a last-gasp effort not so much to ‘make America great again’ but to ‘keep it white for as long as possible’. Whether or not cosmopolitan elites wish to see it (or are comfortable discussing it), a number of serious studies of contemporary populism suggest that it is not, in essence, the cry of the dispossessed or of those losing out as a result of globalisation, but rather the protest of a single ethnic group that has long been retreating from global predominance and now sees itself declining at home. As the British newspaper the Independent argued, noting the rapidity of ethnic change in the US: ‘Racial anxiety is deep in white American ethnicity. Now Trump has weaponised it.’37 Areas most unsettled by mass immigration were the ones most likely to back Trump, while rapid ethnic change rather than Rust Belt economic resentment is a better explanation of populism in the US, when median wages are at last rising and unemployment is below 5%. Trump’s most iconic pledge was not to reopen the coalmines but to build a wall to prevent Mexican migration, and the reasons behind it were not poor economic performance or youth unemployment, even if these have additionally contributed to the frustrations fuelling the growth in his support.
Donald Trump’s famous Mexican wall, the characterising theme of the 2016 presidential election, is perhaps best conceived as a demographic wall, designed to ward off the consequences of past fertility choices that have led to the numbers of WASPs stagnating while those of Latinos boom. Yet as noted, more Mexicans have left the US in recent years than arrived, itself the result of a waning in the birth rate in Mexico (where it is now below twenty per thousand, whereas in the early 1970s it was over forty) as well as of rising economic prospects back home.38 In parallel, many Latinos are fast assimilating into American life with the third generation even ceasing to speak Spanish. Nevertheless, their presence has transformed vast swathes of the United States and American life. (It is notable that Trump’s closest rivals for the Republican nomination in 2016–Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz–are either fully or partly of Latino origin and the next runner up, Jeb Bush, is married to a Latina.)
The Rest of the West Follows Suit
The demographic fate of the rest of the West has largely resembled the United States, with a post-war baby boom ending in the mid 1960s and eventually being followed by mass immigration from the global south. This has been true of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and Western Europe. The immigrants to Europe have generally come from former colonies or from non-European countries with which the host nation has been associated: from south Asia and the Caribbean in the case of the UK, north Africa in the case of France, and Turkey (a German ally before and during the First World War) in the case of Germany. Spain has had its own arrival of Latin Americans.
As in other matters demographic, the UK has been at the forefront of developments. Until the post-war era the only significant inflows from outside the British Isles since the Norman invasion had been of Europeans, perhaps 50,000 Huguenots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and perhaps 200,000 Jews in the decades immediately before the First World War.39 The former had integrated entirely into British society, to the point where speaking of ‘Huguenot communities’ would be meaningless. The latter, themselves increasingly intermarrying and assimilating into the local population, represented even at their demographic peak never more than 1% of the total population. Individuals had appeared from the colonies from time to time, but had never created demographically sustainable communities.
Small black populations in some ports, particularly Liverpool, merged into the wider population. This changed after 1945, starting with an inflow from the Caribbean. By 1971 there were ove
r 300,000 West Indian-born people in the UK and by the mid 1970s the community had reached around half a million.40 A larger wave of immigrants came from the Indian subcontinent, either direct from India and the newly created state of Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) or from the descendants of south Asian migrants to east Africa. Often the former were men who came in search of work: in 1961 there were more than five Pakistani-born men in the UK for every Pakistani-born woman. Yet in due course family reunions were more common than returns to the homeland. Further migrations have occurred from a wide variety of sources in recent decades, often in the form of asylum seekers and economic migrants or involving movement within the EU. The scale of immigration in the post-war era now looks modest by comparison to the early years of the twenty-first century. In some twelve-month periods since 2000 more people were arriving in Britain than had been the case in the whole period 1066–1950.41
The impact on the ethnic make-up of the UK of this turn of the tide has been profound. While in the immediate post-war era those of white British and white British/Irish origin would have made up almost the entire population, by 2011 those defining themselves as white British had declined to just over four-fifths. The number of whites overall fell from 91.3% to 86% of the population of England and Wales in a period of just ten years. Asians were over 7% of the population and those identifying as black (Afro-Caribbean, African or black British) were more than 3%.42 People of non-European origin made up 40% of the population in the UK’s largest cities and in London outnumbered whites in every age group up to twenty.43 The population of immigrant origin is much younger than the indigenous population; proportionately, there are twice as many under tens in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities as in the white British one. Although fertility rates of minorities have tended to converge downwards to those of the white British population (indeed Indian fertility rates may be lower), with continuing inflows of immigrants, the population of white British origin may be heading to below 60% of the total by the middle of the twenty-first century in the UK, while non-whites will rise over half a century from around 10% to around 30%.44 The balance will be made up of people of continental European extraction.