Europeans struggle with idea of 'replacement migration'

In the industrial nations, 75 percent of the population lives in urban areas. That will increase to 84 percent by 2030, the UN says.

The number of mega-cities will grow (see map). But only a small proportion of the population lives in the huge conglomerations – 3.7 percent now, 4.7 percent in 2030.

Most of the new urban dwellers will live in settlements with fewer than 500,000 people. These cities have 52.5 percent of all urban residents now.

Mexico, the biggest provider of immigrants to the United States, is headed for a stable population. That, at least in theory, could reduce the border-crossing pressures on the Mexican-American border.

That's just one of the intriguing findings in a number of reports by demographers to a recent United Nations conference in New York.

A group of demographers from Mexico's National Population Council assumes that the number of births on average by Mexican women will reach 2.1 – the replacement level – by 2005. Then the fertility rate will fall to 1.68 children by 2030. If so, Mexico's population could stabilize in a few decades, and then decline.

Mexico's population of 100 million today is six times what it was 70 years ago. During the early 1960s, Mexican women had an average of 7.2 children each. Now women have 2.4 children on average.

About 71 percent of married women of child-bearing age use contraceptives. For the fertility rate to fall to the replacement level, that number would need to increase to approximately 73 percent, the study finds.

Since Mexico has a strong family-planning program, the authors consider such an increase feasible.

Other findings include:

• One important reason fertility levels have fallen so low in some European countries is that women are just not getting married at all.

This is especially so in countries such as Italy and Spain, where societies frown upon childbearing outside marriage, notes Alak Malwade Basu of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies in Cambridge, Mass.

The proportion of never-married women at age 45 is 11 percent in Italy and Spain, compared with only 5 percent in the United States.

The author doubts that nonmarriage will be so prevalent in South Asia and China, where the joke has always been that there is no impediment to marriage; a "suitable" groom can and always will be found. In India, for instance, a mere 1.4 percent of women ages 30 to 49 were "never married" in 1998-99. But medical technology allowing a mother to choose the gender of embryos brought to birth, may accommodate South Asian patriarchal preferences for a preponderance of sons. In this way fertility rates could fall below the replacement level.

• The Philippines has not seen the dramatic drop in fertility rates experienced in such neighboring countries as Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore. Women still average about 3.8 babies.

Two Philippine demographers suggest the "alleged pronatalism" policies of the Roman Catholic Church does not exercise a strong direct influence on the fertility desires of women. But the strong church opposition to contraception "has been a major factor in preventing the government from committing funds" for family planning. Moreover, most Philippine parents believe that it is not healthy to let a child grow up without siblings.

Induced abortion is both illegal and relatively unavailable in the Philippines. That's not likely to change soon, note Marilou Palabrica-Costello and John Casterline of the Population Council in Manila.

• Fertility declines in 20 developing nations cannot be related in "any statistically significant way" to the level of either internal or foreign funding of family planning programs, Steven Sinding, professor of clinical public health at Columbia University in New York finds. And because of a decline in "any sense of urgency about high fertility at senior policy levels," either in donor nations or in most developing countries, the external efforts to restrain population growth may be close to having run their course, he argues.

Far more important to continued declines in fertility, he says, will be domestic efforts of nations and the "global momentum" toward a small-family norm evident virtually everywhere.

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