Transcript: How Migration Is Reshaping Ethnic Diversity
Podcast featuring Dan Hiebert on Demographic Change, Aging Populations, and the Future of Migration and Identity
▶ Watch and listen to Episode 2
Conversation Highlights
On the global fertility decline
“Everywhere, pretty much in the world, the rate of fertility is falling. This started in the more developed countries, the global north, but it’s diffused now into middle income countries, even into a number of low income countries. So just to give you a couple of examples of this, it wasn’t so long ago that we talked about the world population explosion.”
— Dan Hiebert
On the battle of narratives
“No, I think it’s relevant also, we talked last time about the imaginaries, which is different from narratives, but I think it is a battle of narratives. It was then and it’s still now. I do agree.”
— Georg Diez
On superdiversity and migration
“These changes in the nature of migration, especially since the 80s, 90s up till today, really form part of this relationship that we had between scholarship and government. So yeah, at COMPAS, that was the Center on Migration Policy and Society at University of Oxford. I was the founding director of that.”
— Steven Vertovec
On Africa’s emerging role
“This is happening not evenly across the world. As I said, it kind of started in higher income countries and it’s moved to middle income countries. But even now, there are certain parts of the world that have not yet fully entered this trend, and that is particularly Africa.”
— Dan Hiebert
On journalism and migration
“Yeah, no, that’s I think part of my disenchantment with journalism in general to be able to drive forward positive change and actually fulfill a more constructive role in society.”
— Georg Diez
Chapter Overview
00:00 The Migration Crisis and Its Implications
03:07 Media Narratives and Migration
06:00 Globalization and Migration Dynamics
09:13 Cultural Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity
12:14 Government Policies and Migration Management
14:56 Superdiversity vs. Multiculturalism
18:06 From Multiculturalism to Diversity
21:03 Migration Scholarship and Policy in Germany
23:55 Public Perception and Migration Narratives
27:12 Future Projections for Migration and Identity
32:50 The Role of Journalism in Migration Discourse
35:35 Demographic Change and the Future of Diversity
39:57 Aging Populations and Economic Implications
44:14 The Welfare State and Migration Dynamics
49:33 Government’s Role in Navigating Demographic Changes
53:34 Cultural Shifts and Fertility Trends
56:06 The Battle of Narratives in Migration Policy
1:01:44 Future of African Migration and Global Labor Needs
Full Transcript
00:00 — The Migration Crisis and Its Implications
Georg Diez (00:00)
Countries like Japan or Germany are suffering from this age crisis.
Steven Vertovec (00:04)
Bringing in new migrants to provide gaps in the labor market is going to be a key feature.
Georg Diez (00:10)
These are all measures that need a strong government.
Steven Vertovec (00:15)
70 % of the German population is still pro-diversity, pro-migrant.
Georg Diez (00:22)
but I think it is a battle of narratives.
Steven Vertovec (00:36)
Hi, I’m Steve Vertovec and we’re here with the Futures of Difference podcast. I’m here with my friend, the journalist and writer Georg Diez. And today we’re going to be talking about a subject that comes to a lot of people’s mind when talking about social difference and social categories and so forth, and that is migration.
Georg Diez (01:25)
No, it’s such a fascinating topic, I think. For me as a long-time journalist, it’s such a contentious topic and you have so much experience in the field. And I think we’re going to have a really interesting aspect actually that I didn’t think about so much, demographics and the role of Africa in it. So I’m really, really looking forward to that conversation.
Steven Vertovec (01:19)
Now, again, one of the reasons why we’re talking about migration early on in this podcast series is people associate difference often with people coming from other places, cultural difference, or the fact that people may look different or their style and clothing is different. Linguistic difference is a huge part of categorization of others as well. But as well as things like values, certain cultural practices, family formation, all kinds of aspects of people’s lives are deemed different from so-called host populations into which migrants come. And so again, early on we should be talking about migration. It’s not the only or necessarily even in certain contexts, the most important mode of difference. But I think for a lot of people in the population, when you say, a category of difference they’ll think you’re talking about migrants of some sort.
Georg Diez (02:19)
Such a politically charged topic also. And we talked about this last episode with Michele Lamont’s take on stigmatization and difference as a problem and migration as sort of the root cause of that, which it is not, I guess, but maybe it’s something that pushes that contention forward and leads, I guess, to what some call populist backlash. We said last time was more, you said it was a front lash. It’s actually interesting to think about because we want to talk about present with regards to the future. We want to sort of explore not only what’s happening, but what will happen.
Steven Vertovec (03:02)
And a major part of this, whether we call it a backlash, front lash, maybe that’s not particularly helpful, but a certain change in the discursive sphere, the way certain groups are talked about, certainly in many cases in social media, amongst right-wing parties and so forth, they do focus on migrants and migrant forms of difference as part of a threat narrative, we call it. Of saying, be afraid, these people are making irredeemable changes to your society that threaten their coherence or their future dynamics or threaten traditional cultural practices of your country and so forth. And so, yeah, again, it is important to think about and talk about how migrants play into this whole sphere of stigmatizing certain categories of people.
03:07 — Media Narratives and Migration
Georg Diez (03:54)
And this is really your expertise. We have your friend and colleague Dan Hiebert later in the episode with his take on how demographic changes will affect population, how they are set up or how populations decrease actually in parts of the world and what governments can do. But you have so much experience actually in the field from your career in anthropology and working for Max Planck and other institutions. What’s looking back from today, what is your view of what you actually did or learned and who you worked with in the time that you were in the field?
Steven Vertovec (04:41)
Yea Well, I’ve certainly had lots of experience studying migrant populations, migrant flows, migrant dynamics. But one of the things I’d like to bring to the fore is a relationship as a scholar with government as well, because obviously, and this will play into some of the discussions with and around what Dan Hiebert is going to say, of course, governments are in the position of managing, curbing, or attracting migrants for various purposes, various reasons, various aspects of politics, economy and society. And so yes, I’ve had experience as a scholar working with governments, particularly the British government. So I was a number of years a professor at Oxford. And first, I was director of a national research program called Transnational Communities.
Georg Diez (05:35)
When was that?
Steven Vertovec (05:36)
It was in the late 90s.
Georg Diez (05:38)
Different time
Steven Vertovec (05:40)
Very different time. And that’s part of one of the points I’m going to make here. So the Transnational Communities program was at a time when we were really starting to appreciate with new modes of technology, the way that migrants who came from one country, one part of the world to another managed to maintain a life really, social connections, political, economic connections with another part of the world in everyday terms. This was before we had Skype and Zoom and so forth, but nevertheless at that time, the cost of international telephone calls absolutely crashed. And so it allowed people to be in daily contact with their loved ones, with community organizations, with political organizations, religious organizations in their place of origin, as well as in the place to which they moved. And so, it was a national research program. We had 19 projects all around Britain, universities and research institutes. And we worked with government trying to inform them about these new or let’s say differentiated lifestyles and ways of living that migrants to Britain were undertaking and what implications they had. One of the big implications was remittance flows. That’s the amount of money that people send back to their place of origin. And this in the late 90s, early 2000s also went through the roof and became a large part of the global economy. And we did research and informed the government that this is a huge part of development for a lot of countries, the money that migrants sent back and how important that was, as well as contributing to the labor market and society in the place to which they moved. And so working with the British government, we did manage to inform them, give them a different understanding. A lot of our results came into things like government white papers and so forth. And we did manage to change some government perspectives on migration. That was followed by a…
06:00 — Globalization and Migration Dynamics
Georg Diez (07:51)
How would you think was the take on that at the time? So Because as we said, this is such a different period in, I guess, Western history. There was this view that this is multicultural society. We discussed this last time about the terms of you’re a bit skeptical because it’s a term that’s not really, but you may explore that a bit more. Like, why is it a problematic term? But in general, there was a sense of the world coming together in some way and finding ways to live together. I think it’s interesting. So if we come back to these issues again and again, that there’s this huge part of technology. So that always plays a role in how groups are constituted and then also see themselves. First of all, as you said, the telephone, now it’s the internet and that’s really undervalued, I guess, to understand that aspect. And then there is always the economy and the economic factors. And today we see mostly discussions about culture. So these are the three, at least three different aspects. I think it’s always dangerous if culture is discussed, mostly because that’s where the contention comes in. And maybe that was different in the late 80s, early 90s. There was more optimistic view of culture as a space for finding common ground or how do you remember that?
09:13 — Cultural Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity
Steven Vertovec (09:22)
I think throughout this podcast series, we’ll come back to the issue of culture. And, I mean as an anthropologist, I’ve spent a lot of time not only looking at cultural practices, differences, worldviews, and so forth, but the ways that people have conceived what culture is. It’s another issue about multiculturalism and so forth. But, you know, I want to come back to what you’re saying about that time, the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, again, this was the great age of globalization. This is when everyone was talking about globalization in different forms, the greater interconnectivity of the world. And what our work on Transnational Communities brought into that understanding, conversations around globalization, is that migrants themselves, these kind of everyday people from the countryside or cities in the global south or Eastern Europe or wherever, were moving, had increased mobility, transportation, lower costs and so forth, but were maintaining these linkages. So globalization wasn’t just about commodity flows and linkages or multilateral agreements between countries, but migrants themselves were linking parts of the world in diasporas. This was also a time when the study of diasporas also was starting to boom. We realized that people around the world had these connections that they were maintaining. So the world was becoming a much more integrated and interlinked sphere than we had ever appreciated before. And so our work was showing how migrants, you know, these small people and families on the ground, not just the big corporations or governments we’re actually linking the world and bringing it together in ways that we hadn’t appreciated before.
Georg Diez (11:22)
Would you think, looking backwards, I mean, this is a time of optimism and I guess, now it’s not a time of optimism, but was it even true that optimism at the time? So from your work, was the optimism really more about a certain elite view of globalization working or was there actually in governments or in the societies, that you studied, a more positive optimistic view of how migration could also benefit societies? I mean, remembering from the discussion in Germany, that doesn’t seem like it was actually the debate at the time. Even then, it seemed to be discussed really under this premise of this is a threat to German identity. We can’t afford this. So it was never broadly discussed as a not only necessary but productive positive change of society. I don’t know if that’s maybe important to understand that there was optimism or how to rekindle that optimism in government’s ability to create or constructively work with migration. Because I think that’s necessary going forward. So that we have an understanding, first of all, about the power of governments, but also about how to communicate actually that this is beneficial. I don’t know if there’s something to learn from the time then and your work within government.
12:14 — Government Policies and Migration Management
Steven Vertovec (13:05)
Well, I think there’s never been a time when there hasn’t been some skepticism, particularly in conservative spheres, about migration. And that’s again, coming back to your point about culture. Some people see migrants as a cultural threat or something that will dilute a presumed national culture. But then this is often pitted against the economic needs, particularly of business, the need for labor. And that is always a balancing act to try to bring the public along into understanding the needs for migration. There’s always a kind of trope: Oh migrants steal jobs. Endless amount of studies by economists, by sociologists and others show that that is really not the case. They actually fill jobs. They fill job vacancies because there’s not enough labor. That was the time in the 90s and 2000s. That’s the point up to now. And as we’ll talk about further in this episode, that’s going to be the future scenario as well. The need for migration, not just a matter of managing the mobility of people who want to move around for their own purposes, but the need to maintain a labor market and goods and service production and so forth. But it’s always that balancing act with presumed ideas about culture. And again, difference are key concepts throughout this series.
14:56 — Superdiversity vs. Multiculturalism
Georg Diez (14:57)
So regarding your work with governments, you worked in the UK for a bit. And then you, I think, worked more with Oxford on a program called COMPAS. But in general… And then you worked with German government. So maybe I would be interested about not only futures of difference, but the varieties of difference. I think it’s interesting for me to explore that a bit. So what is the difference in the UK, which is strongly colonial, which is a very different sort of story of difference as opposed to Germany, which is not colonial, but post-war migration, but also different migration that we talk about now. It’s much more structural, sort of with what’s called Gastabeiter in Germany. So it’s more structural and also economically driven. Migrant population and the UK is much older. Much more complicated I guess in lot of ways, but maybe also layered across, maybe in the 80s it was already changing or early 90s was already changing with the opening of the world, as you say, with the end of the Cold War. Maybe that affected that migrant view already then.
Steven Vertovec (16:15)
Yeah, absolutely. These changes in the nature of migration, especially since the 80s, 90s up till today, really form part of this relationship that we had between scholarship and government. So yeah, at COMPAS, that was the Center on Migration Policy and Society at University of Oxford. I was the founding director of that. So at COMPAS, one of the main things that we achieved is I think we did manage to change the minds and inform and create a better understanding of migration dynamics amongst a cadre of civil servants. But again, there was just a ceiling when it came to the politicians. The politicians frankly weren’t interested in more nuanced complex views of migration. They needed to provide, as they see it, simple messages to the population to the voting public and so forth. And that became a very frustrating endeavor. We were seeing the emergence of much more complex patterns of migration that I ended up writing about as super diversity. We have many different pathways and experiences of migration, all related to different kinds of policy changes and so forth. And we argued for a much more complex understanding. And some people got it, and the politicians weren’t even interested in getting it.
Georg Diez (17:49)
What’s the, you say diversity that is your term, super diversity, but you also sort of, there’s also this shift at the time, no, between how to think about multicultural society and how to, why talk about diversity? What was the background for that change of vocabulary?
18:06 — From Multiculturalism to Diversity
Steven Vertovec (18:11)
Well, that’s right. Throughout the 80s and 90s in Britain, but also in places like Canada, Australia, et cetera, the concept of multiculturalism was one of the foremost concepts of how society was understanding itself, but also a lot of policy implications, a lot of institutional arrangements and so forth was around providing rights and services and basically a kind of public space for different so-called communities based around language, country of origin, religion and so forth. And of course, in many ways, especially in terms of kind of cultural rights, that was a good thing. I was critical and I wrote a number of critical things throughout the 90s and early 2000s around multiculturalism though, is because it was starting to create very bounded and stereotypic understandings or representations of particular purported groups. And again, our work and understanding was showing that these groups were actually very complex in themselves, often including many different legal statuses, linguistic, cultural, other backgrounds. And so multiculturalism was painting itself a simplified notion of society. At the same time, politicians David Cameron, Angela Merkel in Germany, were criticizing the idea of multiculturalism because they thought that having a number of different so-called cultural communities was breaking apart a kind of social cohesion of a society, of chopping it into bits. And again, that was a kind of awkward discussion. We could have a whole podcast series just about that, I think, about this, contestation and meanings of multiculturalism and so forth. Nevertheless, a lot of the conservative politicians had their way. A lot of multicultural discourse went out of the public sphere, and it was largely replaced by diversity, which then came to include gender, sexuality, disability as part of a makeup of social difference and a rethinking of social categories that count in society.
Georg Diez (20:41)
Before we move into the future, maybe you describe a bit where we come in with your friend Dan Hiebert talking about mostly, I guess, changes how migration is actually happening these days and then what was actually the societal background to that? I think it’s important to understand also that there is an analytical, there’s a shift in the factual basis of how to talk about migration that’s not really acknowledged in public discourse, how I see it, and that’s part of the public discourse problem, that the actual need for migration isn’t talked about, it’s more the threat of migration that’s in the foreground. How was it different working in Germany when you came to Max Planck in the mit 2000s, I guess?
21:03 — Migration Scholarship and Policy in Germany
Steven Vertovec (21:38)
Well, there was a couple of different things when I landed in Germany 2007, 2008. Yeah, it was still caught up in this multiculturalism is dead, not quite accepting Germany as an immigration country. You remember that was a big debate. Is it? Is it not? Well, obviously it is because you have people coming here, but the way that they wanted to self-represent Germany was at that time not immigration. So that was a bit of a contestation coming in. And coming to Max Planck was very different for me because in the UK, it was an expectation that publicly funded research institutes like COMPAS, that I was director of, that we had to have a social impact with our work. We had to change policy, we had to change public understanding and so forth. And I came to Max Planck and, you know, their view is that it’s a good thing, of course, if we do have that impact, but first and foremost, it’s about the science. You need to bring the science forward. You need to make contributions. You need to change methods and so forth. So they’re much more interested in the science that we’re doing rather than how it translates into the public. So that was a bit of a difference for me. But at the same time, I was invited to be one of the original members of what’s called the Sachverständigenrat, the expert council on Migration. And this was set up at that time by a number of the large foundations in Germany, Mercator, Volkswagen, and so forth. And they wanted to be the civil society voice for thinking about migration and advising the government or giving critical feedback and so forth. And so that was our role at the time. The Sachverständigenrat now has changed, it’s actually financed by the government now. It still has that critical function, but it’s slightly different. But at that time, The Sachverständigenrat, when I was on it, the role was to kind of translate to the public, this is what government changing policy on migration looks like. This is its implications. This is context that’s happening and this is how it’s being understood by the public. We set up something called the Integration Barometer, a kind of way of feeling the temperature of what the population in Germany is thinking about migration and migrants and so forth. So we set up all these instruments. So you see what I mean? It was again, policy relevant, but we weren’t driven by policy. And sometimes we said good things about government policy. Sometimes we were very critical of government debates that were happening at the time and the way that government was talking about migration to the public.
23:55 — Public Perception and Migration Narratives
Georg Diez (24:34)
Seems like a long time ago. The way that you perceive it as or that you would portray it as of the big civic society understanding that there is a rational way, “Sachverständigen” is a very rational way of putting it in the German context, way of talking about migration. I guess then the Syrian civil war started and migration crisis, as it was called, sort of started to really put the heat on societies and politicians in a quite destructive way. I remember the public sphere was really going crazy around 2015/16. I was a columnist back then, I really felt a shift in the mode of society and discourse. It was the early days of social media, but was social media really kicking in and determining very much how media was reporting and surely more and more how policy or politicians were done and were working and how policy was conceived. So there was this, again, this technological shift in the public sphere that led to a very charged discourse and very problematic, I think, combination of how resentment was growing and maybe outpacing actually rationality in the discourse. And I think it’s interesting to maybe if we go a bit from the present to the future to see, as I said before, like what is the factual basis, what is actually happening? Because even today you can see there is a drop in actually refugees coming and that doesn’t reflect on… this is not reflected in the public discourse where there’s still more panic about some incidents of violence and the general distrust in a racist distrust I think in a lot of ways about migration. I don’t know if you want to say something about Dan because I think it’s interesting to pivot now to where we will be going, I guess, as a planet, because that’s his perspective. He is really zooming out and say, this is the next 30, 40 years, this is where we’re going. I think it’s really hugely helpful to understand this projection for policy today.
27:12 — Future Projections for Migration and Identity
Steven Vertovec (27:12)
Yeah, Absolutely. Let’s make that pivot. But you raised something important. I just want to comment on and for us to keep in mind as we think about futures of migration and so forth. So you raised the issue of the Sachverständigenrat and this kind of rational discursive argument that we presented as a Sachverständigenrat to the German society to help understand migration, its dynamics and its effects and so forth. That was all well and good. And then 2015, 2016 happened. This large influx of asylum seekers. And the way that that sent ripples through German society. I wrote a piece in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I actually called it Germany’s zweite Wende, the second changing point, that this is going to have changes to German society almost on the level of reunification of Germany. It’s going to send all kinds of ripples, both good and bad, throughout Germany.
And so, you mentioned a kind of emotional counter to the rationalist argument around migration. And I think that was certainly the case with the so-called Willkommenskultur, the welcome culture in Germany. We saw a mass outpouring of the general public welcoming this influx of people. And I really got irritated with a lot of the, especially the foreign press started to talk about, yeah, this hippie-like, touchy-feely, welcome culture, and quickly died out, and you had the rise of the far right and so forth. And most of our research at our Max Planck Institute shows, no, that did not die out at all. 70 % of the German population is still pro-diversity, pro-migrant, wants to have a society that’s diverse and complex and so forth. It’s only a minority that are really so antagonistic about it. But the media portrayal, you would think differently. You would think that Germany is completely taken over by the AfD and so forth. And that’s still not the case. That so-called welcome culture, that kind of emotional response, compassionate response to welcoming people in need, that is still there.
Georg Diez (29:33)
No, I think it’s relevant also, we talked last time about the imaginaries, which is different from narratives, but I think it is a battle of narratives. It was then and it’s still now. I do agree. mean, I was reporting from Munich at the time and it was just a very clear understanding. There was a civic pride in what society could do and what a citizen can do. And I also portrayed it in some way as a Kennedy moment, for Germany. It’s really not wait for… don’t ask what the state can do for you, but you do yourself. And that was the mood and that’s not something, it’s quite irrational to think about that this is like something made up or something that is only superficial in society. It’s a weird way of thinking about society and it’s part of, I think, my problem with the narratives that are created in media that they so often created along the lines of what media thinks, how the world works. And it’s actually not how people work because people are really affected by things and then act. It’s not fake. As you say, it stays and it actually changes society in ways that apparently media narratives can’t pick up and can sort of continue to, I think the attention span is too short and it’s not interesting because change is actually not interesting to report on because it’s not something visible.
Steven Vertovec (31:13)
Well, this was an experience I had as well. It’d be interesting to get your take on this. I forget when it was, not immediately following 2015, 2016, but a few years later, I was invited to your former organ: “Der Spiegel”. And I spent a day with editors and journalists at “Der Spiegel” talking about their coverage of migration and how they cover it.
And, you know, they were pretty explicitly saying, I remember as one guy put it, he says, there’s always 10,000 airplanes in the sky. We have to report on the one that falls down. And I said, well, but isn’t it an interesting and important thing to talk about the 10,000 in the air, i.e. to talk about the good news, the normality of something that’s actually quite phenomenal and not just to focus on the bad news, the one thing that goes wrong. And they wouldn’t really have that. And they thought that bad news stories about migration are what they want to cover, not the everyday good news of how people contribute to society, become part of their communities, and so forth.
Georg Diez (32:28)
Yeah, no, that’s I think part of my disenchantment with journalism in general to be able to drive forward positive change and actually fulfill a more constructive role in society. I think it’s not about like wishy-washyness, it’s more about actual realism so that there is an important factor in creating narratives that are actually true as opposed to, narratives that are like partly true or exaggerated, which is the negative. I remember reporting at the time and the reaction was, there was the role of the German… the Munich mayor for example was a very positive, strong figure at the time. And it was not so interesting. So it was explicitly said, no, it’s hard. We don’t want that. So I wouldn’t say it’s an intentional bias. It’s more like a misconception of what actually journalism is. So it needs to be reporting critically on things. That’s true, but it’s also democracy, the important factor to contribute to a positive vision or to an imaginary that is actually transformative. And I think media is not able to produce transformative narratives because they distrust it. They think then they’re activists. But I think it’s a really wrong conception. It is a problem, especially in the migrant discourse or in this moment where there is a massive change in societies and migration is just one of it. I mean, there’s aging populations, which we’ll talk about. There’s climate change. There’s technological upheaval. So how do you talk about that in constructive ways? I think it’s essential as a society, but media is not able to do that. Then you have a void that can be filled with fear or distrust.
32:50 — The Role of Journalism in Migration Discourse
Steven Vertovec (34:40)
And as you put it earlier, this battle of narratives is going on, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. And we’ll have to think about what those narrative battles are going to look like as we move into the futures. And basically, as our friend Dan will say, the need for further migration, absolute need for it. The case is being made for that. And how will the narratives deal with that? And how will the media deal with that as we move into the future?
Georg Diez (35:13)
So let’s bring in Dan maybe, because I think it’s interesting how he brings in another dimension of migration, which is the whole big topic of demographics. And I think it’s a topic that people feel uncomfortable with still, because it seems like population engineering has a Malthusian ring to it, so it’s like, it can be dystopian in some ways population fall is either wanted or created or inevitable and what does it do to, again, imaginaries? Is this an aging population? How can an aging population perceive of itself as aging and disconnected from the future in some ways? I think that’s a lot of where Europe is at or Western societies in general are struggling with and creates this resentment in society.
35:35 — Demographic Change and the Future of Diversity
Steven Vertovec (36:10)
The beginning of that struggle.
Georg Diez (36:11)
We’re at the beginning of that struggle. So maybe we’ll listen to Dan and who’s Dan?
Steven Vertovec (36:16)
He’s Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Canada and an advisor to the Canadian government on migration issues. And Dan started off thinking about the futures of migration with a focus on changing demographic realities.
💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia
“Everywhere, pretty much in the world, the rate of fertility is falling. This started in the more developed countries, the global north, but it’s diffused now into middle income countries, even into a number of low income countries. So just to give you a couple of examples of this, it wasn’t so long ago that we talked about the world population explosion. We thought that the population on earth would just keep going and going and going until there was some catastrophe. That’s just turning around. Probably in 2023, maybe last year in 2024, the global fertility rate came down to the level of replacement. So about 2.1, 2.2, somewhere in there. And that’s really a historically new thing for no one alive today has lived in a time before where the demography of the world is kind of in sync now between births and deaths, but births are falling. Couple of quick examples. So this is the one that I think surprises a lot of people. As of last year, the total fertility rate of Mexico is now lower than the United States. The fertility rate of Turkey now is about the same as it is of Europe. So it’s really spread to low income countries. And what this tells us is the world is going to keep growing in terms of population for a while. The United Nations says that the world is going to stop growing in about the 2080s. That’s probably way over optimistic. It’s probably going to stop growing in the 2050s. So we probably have one generation left of global population growth and then we reach the age of peak people. After that, the world population is probably going to go down.”
Georg Diez (38:16)
So that is quite stunning and I think it’s a game changer in how to talk about... It’s a wake-up call and it’s not clear what’s the good news, what’s the bad news, I guess. I mean, he is quite ambivalent about that because if you think about the world simplistically, even then it’s not clear. He says there is this story about the explosion of the world population and it’s threatening because we have a small planet and we have like small limited resources. So I guess in some way it would be good news that we’re not becoming more and more and consume more and more. But within societies that has quite different effects and that is connected to, well, migration is really the wrong word. I think it’s more like migration is only one aspect of worldwide change and the makeup and understanding of how societies work and culture is then something that is where it’s navigated or negotiated and economy is where it’s actually happening. But this is a game changer in a lot of ways because it’s not about population flows that are unmitigated. But it’s more like about population flows that you want to happen, I guess. Or you need to happen.
Steven Vertovec (39:37)
Yeah, I just want to take up that point. You know, there some people who on the face of it would take this fact that Dan laid out about, you know, and eventually and sooner rather than later, global population that’s shrinking and thinking, okay, in a world, you know, seriously challenged by climate change and unsustainable use of resources and so forth, that that in itself might be no bad thing, to bring us back to living within our means as a planet, as it were. So there’s that. But that in itself, I think, is a rather simplified understanding, you know, thinking of the world and its population and resources as just one thing. The problem is it’s incredibly unevenly distributed. The resources, access to resources. Coupled with this idea that you’re going to have an ever more aging population in some parts of the world and a young population in another, coupled with use of resources, maintaining certain standards of living while trying to raise standards of living in other parts of the world. You see what I mean? It’s a much more complex picture of inequality and distribution across the planet, not simply as the planet as a whole. So yes, it might be a good thing, the population stabilizing or even getting smaller, but we’re still faced with major challenges of economy, society, politics, healthcare, other things, and their distribution around the world.
39:57 — Aging Populations and Economic Implications
Georg Diez (41:17)
And that’s such a crucial topic. I think societies like Germany, but maybe the UK is similar or the Western societies, they wake up to this understanding that they are actually aging and what are the policy requirements or what are the consequences of that change? And then I think Dan talks about that fact, that from population degrowth follows, specifically in Western societies, but also in other societies ...
Steven Vertovec (41:51)
And one of the key things again is this aging. We should listen to what what Dan says about that. Some of the challenges of simply that one part of the equation of global demographics and their future is what happens when one part of that planet is an incredibly old population without young people.
💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia
“Maybe that’s good. Like maybe we need to have a kind of right sizing of the world population, given the amount of resources we’re using and everything else. But in a transition period from high growth to negative growth global population, we’re going to have a transition period of lots of challenges. And those challenges will mainly be related to aging populations. Countries are going to have older populations. Fewer young people, older people living longer. And when that happens, you get lots of stresses and strains on the social welfare system. For example, the ability to provide people with health care. I’ll use a Canadian set of numbers, but every country is much the same, right?! The per capita cost of health care for a Canadian is about $6,000 per year. For a Canadian in their 90s, it’s about $35,000 per year. So the more Canadians you have in your 90s, the more your health care budget is going to be strained, especially when you don’t have as many in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. So as fertility falls, as populations age, it’s going to be really difficult to keep these services going. Best example of this, or maybe the most sobering example of this, is Japan. Japan is the world’s oldest society. It’s tried to maintain a full level of social services. And what has that done? It’s put the country in enormous debt. The debt to GDP ratio of Japan is about 260 or 270%. It’s extremely high. It’s very, very hard to keep these things going.”
Georg Diez (43:51)
I think again, for today, very relevant information and also pointing towards, as we discussed sometimes, of how the public sphere reacts or how politicians work with rallies. Very troubling because you see these debates around the welfare state, we can’t afford that, mostly under the premises of, we need to cut welfare and we need... It’s also discussed in terms of migration so we can’t afford to integrate these people who need that safety net. And it’s actually totally the wrong story. The story is as, as Dan makes clear, that these countries like Japan or Germany and to different degrees, the UK or the US, are suffering from this age crisis and the social welfare state is really not affected by migration, but to the contrary actually would need massive influx. In Germany, it’s in the hundreds of thousands per year to actually sustain that social welfare state. So I’m wondering, I mean, I don’t know what’s your take on that. So for a journalists, it’s frustrating to be not able to portray this crisis in its full dimensions. What is the problem, what’s the solution. I think what we’re facing is, as Dan says, is this massive transition period. And this is a long period. We need to somehow have the mental capacity, actually, the mental infrastructure, that is also politics and journalism, to be able to navigate that without being so destructive.
44:14 — The Welfare State and Migration Dynamics
Steven Vertovec (45:35)
And one thing I want to get on the table as well, because this is a series about social categories and modes of difference. The category, however we want to call it, aged person, senior citizen or something, is going to take on new meanings in itself. As a larger portion of the society is comprised of senior citizens, aging people and so forth. And you know, as I say, even before we come to migration, we’re going to see a considerable shift in social services and even infrastructures designed more for older people. Accessible transportation, goods and services, entertainment, all kinds of things are going to be geared towards a population that’s ever bigger and bigger. And whether that’s going to be a new source of political power, of economic power, or if it’s going to be considered and portrayed as more of a drain on society and resources and a cause of resentment. We know all the different ways that certain social categories are loaded with meaning. That’s one of the lessons of this whole podcast series, how social categories take on new meanings and values over time and how that has ripple effects in actual social relations, in political structures and so forth. So that’s even before we come to migration. And then as you rightly point out and as Dan’s talking about, the need for a labor force to continue the production of goods and services for a society and particularly for a society geared towards an aging population is going to be absolutely acute if people want to maintain anything like the quality of life and cultural system that they have now, which is also a big question, combined with the question of climate change and sustainable use of resources. So I think we’re going to see all kinds of reconfigurations of social categories, use of resources, political policies and so forth around changing society. And bringing in new migrants to provide gaps in the labor market is going to be a key feature of that realignment and reconfiguration, I think.
Georg Diez (48:07)
It’s also central to understand what’s the role of government here, I think. It would come out of a period where government was really seen as the problem for lot of people, but certainly not as a strong actor in the changes that we see. So technology is driven by tech giants, by markets in general, markets were seen as the force for good for some people. But for sure the energy in society and as we move into that space where you need to understand what’s the makeup of society? By migrants or influx, or by what Dan also discusses of governmental measures to increase the fertility rates in countries. These are all measures that need a strong government and a policy background, an understanding as you described for the UK in the early 2000s. And I wonder how you see that because it seems that then there was this infrastructure, this epistemic or actual infrastructure that prepared governments to act constructively or to find a role. And I’m not even sure, like, maybe it’s just a Western problem, maybe other countries, like he talks about… You talk about Singapore a lot, so maybe other countries have that capacity. But I think it’s really state capacity that’s needed to navigate that.
49:33 — Government’s Role in Navigating Demographic Changes
Steven Vertovec (49:42)
This is something that Dan addressed head on. Let’s listen to what he says about how governments, first of all, before they come to migration, react to some of these issues.
💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia
“Why don’t governments fix this? Why don’t governments encourage people to have more children? Why don’t we get a lot of pro natal programs? Actually, that’s been tried. It’s been tried in dozens of countries. No country that has tried to turn fertility around has been fully successful at that. By fully successful, I mean getting to a point of replacement fertility. No country has done that. Maybe the best example here to illustrate the point would be Hungary. So about a decade ago, the Viktor Orban government thought, well, we don’t like immigrants very much. Let’s get Hungarians to have more children. They put in place probably the world’s most extensive pro natal program. Tax incentives, literal financial incentives. Special privileges If you have more children, etc.. At the time when Hungary did this, I’m just going to use a generalized number here just to make it simple. It had a total fertility rate of one and a half. Back in 2016, the target was to get it up to 2.1. To a replacement rate of fertility. What is it now? About 1.3. So, completely not successful. Maybe it would have been even worse if they hadn’t put in all those programs, but nevertheless, those programs are totally not successful. So no country has been able to turn this around.”
Steven Vertovec (51:15)
Yeah, so Dan raises this interesting point that, yeah, you know, one of the obvious reactions to declining fertility rate is increase the fertility rate. And as he points out, you know, this has been tried. And, you know, one thing we need to look at is what are the reasons for dropping fertility rates ar ound the world? You know, it’s not chemical or biological or something in the environment. It’s something in culture and society around the world. And there are many experts who know much more about this than me, but one of the clear things that emerges from some of this work is it has to do with the changing status of women. That women, as they’re able to control their reproductive rights and so forth, they themselves want to have less kids and to have more either economic roles and jobs or a different sort of lifestyle. And we see around the world that as people move into more middle-class lifestyles, that goes along with having less kids. It’s an aspiration for a certain kind of lifestyle of being able to provide more for the children that you have and so forth. So this is part of the global trend everywhere of why fertility rates are changing. Because of women having more say in what they want. It’s not the case universally, but that’s part of the trend. And so to try to change that through government policy is really a battle, a try to force maneuver by government that simply is not going to work with a lot of people.
Georg Diez (53:05)
Also, he’s pointing towards Hungary and he’s polite enough to leave it in a pretty neutral space ideologically. But it’s the same in the US ,at the moment, that actually white nationalists have tried to drive up fertility rates or birth rates among white Christians. So there’s always, I think inherently, an ideology in this world.
53:34 — Cultural Shifts and Fertility Trends
Steven Vertovec (53:38)
And it’s also part of a narrative too that it’s presumed that migrants and particularly non-white migrants, oh, they have so many more children than the rest. And, you know, while at the very beginning, factually, demographically, that might be true, we see across the world and across time within one generation that changes. And migrants, just like the so-called host population, their fertility rate drops enormously and is on par with the rest of society, even within one generation.
Georg Diez (54:15)
I think it’s also interesting that women moving into the workforce work market is both culturally and economically important. And I guess, again, culture is so central in how we maneuver as societies to this transformation. And we have this cultural, Steve Bannon said, politics downstream from culture. So the right understands that and the left is so defensive about what are the narratives of that change. So I think it is interesting going forward how to create these narratives, that are countering narratives of negativity and as Dan says, in a neutral way, the replacement this term. It’s actually the term that the right uses, the great replacement, the fear of the whites dying out with sort shrinking birth rates. And this emergency, this white emergency in some way. And I think that is in this period of transition that we’re in is a highly irrational, highly destructive force in politics. And I wonder, it needs really strong governments, confident governments to maneuver that without, I guess, falling back into rhythms or mechanisms that are pandering to nationalist tropes. And I think the interesting factor is that to understand how societies will be changing. And I think Dan has also some points there, like what are actually... Continents, countries that are sort of not shrinking. I think that also needs different narratives because I think he alludes to Africa mostly and Africa is always seen as the problem, the poor continent. And this will also massively change in the 21st century. Africa will become a really attractive imaginary maybe for... in the world because you need basically, as he says, there’s going to be a competition for young people and they come mainly from Africa. So how do you think about that as?
56:06 — The Battle of Narratives in Migration Policy
Steven Vertovec (56:38)
In another part of the conversation I had with Dan he was talking about, he pulls that a lot of these questions and narratives, as you put it, battle of narratives. He calls it the battle between cultural traditionalists and economic realists. The cultural traditionalists want to maintain a particular image of society that might be a racialized image of society and what its culture, what German culture, American culture, British culture, French, whatever it is, is supposed to look like. And it’s a preservative approach to national culture and how to think about migration in terms of that. And the idea is we’ll keep out migrants because we want to preserve some imagined national culture. And then Dan talks about economic realists who are saying, fair enough, cultural traditionists, you can have that discourse. The fact is though, with an aging society, a society that is not replacing itself, if you want to maintain an economic standard of any kind, and ideally within a sustainable set of resources, you are still going to need migrants to fill all of these gaps. And the way he puts it, the economic realists are going to win by the end of the day because people realize economies shrinking, the need for care for aging populations, and so forth, are simply going to call for more labor from abroad. But given the changes in the world and aging population everywhere, where is that labor going to come from? And let’s hear what Dan has to say about that.
💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia
“This is happening not evenly across the world. As I said, it kind of started in higher income countries and it’s moved to middle income countries. But even now, there are certain parts of the world that have not yet fully entered this trend, and that is particularly Africa. Fertility rates in Africa are still much higher than they are in the rest of the world and to a degree, a few other Middle Eastern countries, but mainly Africa has the world’s highest fertility. And if you just take U.N. population division figures, and they give us very nice projections on where the world’s population is going. If you take those figures between now and the end of this century. So over the next 75 years that what they project is that outside Africa, the global population is going to shrink pretty dramatically. There’s differences of opinion on how big and fast that process is going to be. But by at least a quarter of a billion people. So at least 250 million fewer people in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, if you take those UN projections seriously, Africa will grow by more than 2 billion people. So massive growth in one side, significant decline on the other. Those figures are probably not exactly right, but it doesn’t matter. The main point is going to be that in this next generation or two, Africa will become the world’s only reservoir of youth. It will have the only large, really substantial youthful population in the world. And that, of course, is going to have a lot of meaning.”
Georg Diez (1:00:07)
No, again, fascinating to listen to Dan. I think it’s hugely important to have that factual basis of understanding where societies are moving into. As we discussed, so if it’s really, again about how we think we are as societies and how we think other societies work, and there’s this racial component and you think, oh, the African societies, they have more kids.
And that’s like framed as a racial trope, but actually it would massively shift. And the question is how receptive Western populations, Northern populations are to that to that shift. And I wonder how governments can maneuver that space. But I also wonder what it means then for, because we talk about social categories a lot here and that’s what you work on so much. And that’s also connected to diversity, superdiversity, so it’s not only that there will be African diasporas, I guess, in Europe or in the US, maybe Europe first. I wonder where the migration flows actually go. They already sort of with the Mediterranean, I guess, to go to France and Spain, Italy, so Southern European countries have that influx. But it’s not only, as you say, in your book about superdiversity, it’s not African per se, it’s a much more layered approach of identity or, that’s also a word you don’t like, but like of being in a society. So I don’t know how you see that unfolding in the future.
1:01:44 — Future of African Migration and Global Labor Needs
Steven Vertovec (1:01:44)
No Absolutely. You know, Dan is right to point out and he’s not alone. There are many migration specialists who point to this future in which Africa will be seen as a kind of resource or reservoir of labor, of people. And actually some project that there will be a competition for African workers to come fill all these needs in other countries around the world. And that given the case exactly as you point out, we’re talking about a transformation of key social categories, not least so-called race and ethnicity categories. Already we’re beginning to see these transitions. For instance, at our Max Planck Institute, we have a fantastic project led by Johanna Locate about the changing meanings of blackness in Germany. “Was heißt Schwarz” So the nature of black German is as people from various parts of Africa and other parts of the world, Caribbean, South American, come together and re-craft this category of black. We’ve already seen that. We know in Britain where I lived for a long time, there’s the idea of black British and that itself is a different kind of social category and meaning for people within it and for people outside of that. Different from black american and black European.
Georg Diez (1:03:18)
Because there are Black communities who come from Jamaica or from colonies. Well, and then there’s African migration.
Steven Vertovec (1:03:26)
Exactly. Black British, the concept was forged over generations and over decades, largely surrounding people from the Caribbean. Now people from Nigeria have overtaken people of Caribbean origin in the UK as the largest component of Black British. And they themselves are working together with others, reshaping the meaning of Blackness in Britain. And so as the Africa Diaspora Report becomes more and more part of the social realities in many different countries, we’re going to see social categories changing again for Africans or people from African heritage themselves and for people from the outside. The growing presence of Africans in many societies around the world will be highly contested by some and reshaped and reworked as part of everyday social realities for a lot of other people. That is definitely a future that’s going to happen. The point I want to end with and segue to our next episode though is those identities are not only going to be about race, culture, values, self-identities and so forth, but given the nature of migration regimes around the world, they’re also going to be intersected by various kinds of legal status. So not only will there be more Africans and more societies around the world though, they will be highly differentiated also by the kind of legal status they have, the kinds of rights they have, the kinds of temporalities they’re allowed to have in different countries. And that is going to be a key part of the nature of difference in futures around Africa and migration.
Georg Diez (1:05:20)
So that was a lot of relevant interesting stuff talking about this whole dynamic between the battle for narratives and the need for policy and how to maneuver that in the coming transition. I think it’s really hugely important to have that demographic factor really stronger in the foreground. It seems a bit under covered. It has huge policy implications for how to organize, I guess, incentivize migration and it’s a huge burden. Not burden but responsibility for governments to move forward. And I think it’s interesting to cover that in the coming episodes with the people that you invited.
Steven Vertovec (1:06:44)
Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, that battle of narratives, as you rightly called it, that’s taking place anyways in a kind of discursive sphere of its own, really a battle of cultural values, of moralities and so forth. But then as Dan Hiebert has brought into the conversation, these demographic realities, there’s no arguing with aging societies, falling fertility rates, the growth of Africa as a kind of resource to fill the labor needs of a lot of the world. And when we’re looking at the future, we have to see how those demographic realities are going to affect those narrative battles as well. And as you put it, how these play into policy. And I think a lot of the policy thing has to do with migration channels and the legal statuses that are going to be given to migrants and how those affect the creation of social categories and all of the social and economic implications that follow from that. And those are some of the things we’ll be talking about in the next episode.
Georg Diez (1:07:54)
Great, looking forward to that. Cheers.
About the Guest
Dan Hiebert is a geographer at the University of British Columbia whose research examines how migration reshapes cities, labor markets, and social structures across diverse societies.