The Demographics Argument
Commentators such as Mark Steyn make great of the idea that Muslims will outbreed native Europeans, the effect of which would be the transformation of Europe as we know it within merely a generation or two. Quoting Steyn replying to a reader:
But just to keep it simple. Let’s say you’ve got a population of a million. 90% are ethnic Europeans, 10% are Muslims (the “official” French figure). Let’s pretend they’re all the same age, rather than dealing with the reality of the fact that in, say, London the vast majority of its one million Muslims are under 25. But let’s imagine these million people are all 20 years old. The 900,000 ethnic Europeans with a fertility rate of 1.4 per couple will have 630,000 children and 441,000 grandchildren - steep population decline. The 100,000 Muslims with a fertility rate of 3.8 will have 190,000 children and 361,000 grandchildren - rapid growth. The “overwhelming majority” and the “tiny minority” will have near equal numbers of grandchildren. And, as I said, that’s without ongoing remorseless immigrating and accelerating export of native talent.
But why argue about the when of it? It might slow down or accelerate, but unless there’s a big profound change the Islamization of Britain is inevitable. Why quibble over the hypothetical date of a statistical majority? Once Islam reaches 20% of the population and becomes the majority in every major English city, Britain will be semi-Muslim in its sociopolitical character. Which is to say: Britain, as we’ve known it, will be dead.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the fertility rates remain the same relative to each other, something which as of late has been shown to simply not be true:
In their study, Westoff and Frejka sift through the available data to estimate the level and trends in childbearing among European Muslims. They show that although Muslim immigrants do have more children than other Europeans, their fertility tends to decline over time, often faster than among non-Muslims.
In Austria, for example, Muslim women had a total fertility rate (an estimate of lifetime births per woman) of 3.1 children per woman in 1981, well above the 1.7 average for the majority Roman Catholic women. By 2001, the rate for Catholics had fallen to 1.3, but the Muslim rate had fallen to 2.3—leaving a difference of just one child per woman between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The gap narrowed even further in the former West Germany, where the authors relied on data by mother’s nationality rather than religion. West Germany recruited a large number of workers from Turkey beginning in the 1960s, giving Germany one of Western Europe’s largest Muslim populations. In 1970, Turkish women living in West Germany had more than two more children than German women. By 1996, the difference between these two groups had fallen to one child.
Recent trends in the Netherlands tell a similar story (see figure). The fertility gap between native-born women and women born in predominantly Muslim Morocco and Turkey narrowed considerably between 1990 and 2005.
Proponents of the demographics argument as stated above should be pressed for an answer to the question why these fertility rates will remain essentially the same for the next 25-50 years, a question which they to my knowledge have not addressed at all but merely assumed to have been answered. Further:
But fertility has been falling in many Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa, which may help explain why younger Muslim women have lower fertility than older women. In Turkey, the TFR dropped from 3.3 in the 1985 to 1990 period to about 2.2 in 2003. Over the same span of years, the TFR fell from 4.5 to 2.5 in Morocco, and from 5.6 to 2.1 in Iran, according to UN estimates.
Muslims who grew up in Europe in immigrant families are also likely to adopt the majority population’s preference for smaller families. All countries in Europe have had low fertility for decades.
This invalidates the demographics argument.
Update: A comment claiming that a difference of 1 in the fertility rates between Muslims and non-Muslims still makes a great difference made me actually make use of my mobile phone calculator. Using the figures for Austrian Catholics and Muslims in Austria, and numbers from the CIA Factbook, I get the following (Catholics are 73.6% of Austria’s total population, Muslims are 4.2% of the total population):
Looking only at Catholics and Muslims, Catholics make up 94.6 % and Muslims 5.4% of the total of these two groups. Starting with 946,000 Catholics and 54,000 Muslims, they will have 614,900 and 62,100 children respectively. At this point Catholics will make up 90.8% and Muslims 9.2% of these two groups taken together. These will in turn have 399,685 and 71,415 children respectively, which will correspond to 84.8% and 15.2% respectively of the total of these two groups. This is a considerable shift in demographics, but far from the certain Islamification that is envisioned. And, the remaining 22.2% of Austria’s population has not been taken into consideration. And, this hypothetical scenario will remain merely hypothetical by the fact that we do not know how the fertility rates will develop for the next 50 years. Claiming otherwise is worse than ignorance.
