A South Korean official was expelled from his political party for suggesting the country “import” Vietnamese and Sri Lankan women to boost the declining birth rate.
Kim Hee Soo, the governor of the southern Jindo county in South Jeolla province, was facing an uproar after his televised remarks last week triggered a diplomatic protest from Vietnam. Mr Kim was addressing a town hall meeting when he spoke about measures to address the country’s declining birth rate.
He said South Korea could “import young unmarried women” from places like Sri Lanka or Vietnam to be married off to “young men in rural areas".
You mistake me completely. I’m not advertising the virtues of this system at all. I’m just pointing out that there is nothing Korean or American about declining birth rates. This is a universal phenomenon of a society’s transition from agrarianism where more hands = more wealth to an educated, skilled labor force where each child requires a significant investment.
The US and, for example, Germany use immigration to offset this and keep their population growing. That’s simply a fact you can look up. Japan for example doesn’t want to do this and they’re dealing with the consequences of population decline. This is all over the news for years now.
I’m not saying this is good or bad or anything. This is just the way things are.
Your bit about Ancient Rome is a good laugh because it was hardly a developed society by today’s standards and it did indeed run on imported labor, except they called them slaves. So you are at once off base and also wrong.
That’s not the issue. Wealth became too consolidated. America’s baby boomers weren’t born for efficiency of labor hands. They were born because one person could work one full time job at most employers and afford a house, a car, bills, a few kids, and a vacation every year.
Now that’s not possible for very much of the workforce at all. Raising kids hasn’t gotten that much more expensive to raise in relation to other basic needs. It’s just that all those other basic needs tend to take up a lot bigger portion of your paycheck. People already struggling don’t want to add children to the pile of their struggles.
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