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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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The victories of pro-migrant parties are permanent insofar as they will have changed the ethnic composition of the population, but there are still things that anti-migrant parties can do to limit the speed of further demographic change and foster assimilation. One policy would be to explicitly target percentage of foreign born population as a measure for immigration policy, with automatic immigration restrictions kicking when it's passed. These restrictions could be selective, so as to specifically limit immigration from the developing world while leaving open immigration from e.g. the United States or Japan. One could combine these with pro-natal policies that won't disproportionately favour recent poorer immigrant groups (e.g., tax relief for parents earning above a certain threshold).

Given disparities in TFR between native and immigrant populations, this probably won't have a huge impact on the proportion of population from non-Swedish ethnic backgrounds, but it might successfully reduce the proportion of foreign-born citizens. Moreover, it may allow the percentage of successfully "assimilated" non-native citizens (for most values of "assimilated") to increase over time, and if we're interested in cultural assimilation (as per civic nationalism) rather than just ethnicity (as per ethnic nationalism) that might fix the problem in the long-run. This is true even if you think assimilation is hard; even among groups for whom it's more difficult (e.g., Somalian immigrants) it does happen to a subset of the population.

So unless we're concerned with ethnic change per se, then I think it's too early to sound a council of despair, especially since none of the big European migrant-destination countries have actually implemented heavy-duty policies to reduce percentage of foreign-born citizens. We have to be careful not to say "We've tried nothing and we're all out of options."

Given disparities in TFR between native and immigrant populations

It's not a particularly big disparity. By 2021 statistics, foreign-born TFR is 1,8-1,9 (and falling), native-born 1,6-1,7.