By Joel Kotkin
Monday, September 21, 2026
The land of la familia is now a land of gli
anziani or, less politely, i vecchi, the most elderly society in an aging continent. In the land
of la dolce vita, Italians seem to be having less of it, with some of the lowest birth rates among major European capitals. Half the
population is now over 48 and a quarter over 65.
By 2100, it is projected that the country could have more
80-year-olds than children under five. The country’s population has fallen by 1.5 million since 2015.
Everywhere you walk in Rome and other Italian cities, you see people in their 80s
and 90s struggling with hills and broken pavements. This has created a crisis
of sorts, with some independent groups, acting in guerilla fashion, performing
repairs that the Italian state is unable to perform. In one case a pensioner who filled a pothole received a stiff fine for
daring to address a severe danger to seniors.
Creaking streets and broken ankles are just symptoms of a
greater challenge. Due to a lack of children, Italian schools are, as one observer
put it, “vanishing like glaciers.” Many historic small towns are
depopulating. Increasingly, resources are poured into care for the elderly
while many young Italians seem reluctant to enter the workforce, leaving the
workplace to recent immigrants.
The Italian workforce is expected to contract by 20 percent
over the next 25 years. GDP
growth is among the slowest in the world. Companies large and small, most
notably in the still-vibrant artisanal industries, complain that they cannot
find Italian workers. This is made worse by Italy’s low level of female participation in the workforce,
including in executive positions.
“Italy is going backwards,” suggests economist Veronika
de Romanis, author of the recently published Economy of Fear. Italy, she notes, “is a
nation of tribes” that protects its own but creates few new opportunities for
young people and families.
The Specter of Depopulation
Italy’s dilemma repudiates the hugely influential Population Bomb written a half
century ago by the late Paul Ehrlich. Rather than bursting at the seams, we are
experiencing a demographic implosion that will shape our political and economic life
for decades to come. Roughly two-thirds of countries experience fertility rates
below 2.1, the level needed to replace the current population.
Even India, with the world’s largest population, is experiencing
a dramatic decline in its birth rate. In the Islamic world, both Iran, a supposed center of religious fervor, and Turkey, another quasi-Islamist stronghold, now have fertility rates similar to that of the U.S.
University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde estimates, rather than the
U.N.’s assumed peak global population of 10.4 billion in 2084, humanity will
peak at 9.2 billion in 2060. Generally, U.N.-projected fertility rates have been far higher than
what actually occurred. In the next quarter century, estimates the IMF, China’s population will drop by 155.8 million,
Japan 18 million, Russia 7.9 million, Ukraine 7 million, South Korea 6.5
million, and Italy 7.3 million .
China, with among the world’s lowest fertility rates —
near 1.0 — blames foreign influences, but policies imposed by the communist regime are much to blame,
notably the now-abandoned one-child policy and a commitment to high-density living, which tends to discourage family
formation. Certainly, a recently enacted tax on condoms has not boosted fertility rates, nor has Comrade Xi’s typical propaganda onslaught promoting “a
trend towards family.”
Shanghai,
Beijing, and Guangzhou suffer among the world’s lowest fertility rates,
even lower than places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. A culture
once renowned for familialism is no longer so, as evidenced by the popular new
app called “Are You Dead?” — a way to check up on the elderly, now
living and dying in isolation. It’s a boom market now that the Middle Kingdom
experiences three deaths for every two births. The situation is so
extreme that the state is being forced to bribe people with cash to have children.
Europe is similarly challenged. The EU’s population by 2100 is projected to fall from 443 million to
just under 400 million. The U.S., although not depopulating, has seen its
fertility rate at record lows, roughly half the 1965 level. As recently as a decade ago, most
demographers predicted 400 million Americans by 2050; likely we will not get close
to that. The fertility rate among women between ages 20 and 29 is down 38 percent in the past 18 years. Two-thirds of American counties already have more deaths
than births.
A smaller population, suggests the British author Fred Pearce, could offer some
relief for the natural environment, perhaps lessening the need for
draconian measures that would impoverish more people. But many of the effects
are threatening. Low fertility rates may boost dependence on the welfare
state, particularly as informal networks — children, grandchildren, extended
families, churches, and community organizations — weaken. The iPhone and other
distractions may be great products of technology, but they “[atrophy] our
social muscle,” as Robert Green puts it.
It’s also a potential fiscal nightmare. In high-income
countries, notes McKinsey, the ratio is already 3.9 workers per person over
65, down from 6.8 in 1997. By 2050, the worst dependency ratios will be found in Western
Europe, led by Italy and France, as well as in East Asian countries
such as South Korea, where over 4,000 schools have been closed.
Is Mass Immigration the Answer?
Many see the solution as mass immigration. The National Immigration Forum suggest the U.S. needs a 37
percent jump in migration over 2020 levels “to prevent the US from falling into
demographic and socioeconomic decline.” A 2024 analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model claims the current worker-retiree
level necessitates an annual immigration rate 3.5 times higher than today’s. In
Europe, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development insists on
a need to boost immigration to maintain the labor force.
Many countries are unlikely to open their doors to mass
immigration. This is particularly true in East Asia, where homogeneity is greatly honored and
immigration strictly limited, even in worker-short Japan. Poorer countries such as South Africa, Turkey, Pakistan,
Uganda, Egypt, Kenya, and Ethiopia also resist adding new
people because of their already high unemployment.
In contrast, left-leaning elites in Europe, Oceania, and
North America see mass immigration as the way to address our much-feared
“demographic winter.” Some advocates also see a virtue in boosting racial
diversity and, particularly on the left, a way to shift the political dynamic in their favor. Business, for its part, embraces migration as a wayto
address a shortage of workers and keep wages down, including among the undocumented.
Or Maybe Not?
There are clear, and compelling, reasons to not fully
embrace this conventional wisdom. Europe’s foreign-born population, now at a
record of over 64 million, has not turned out to be a salve for its
sluggish economy. Many countries with the highest per capita rates of immigration — the U.K., Canada,
Germany, and France — also suffer from stagnant economies.
In 2023, Canada, with 40 million residents, received 1 million immigrants. It also suffered the slowest economic growth rates among advanced countries
while its once-high standard of living continued to decline. In Canada, one in five recent immigrants now suffers “deep poverty” —
an income below 75 percent of the poverty line — compared to only 5 percent of the whole population.
In Europe, newcomers also are far more dependent on welfare transfers than are natives. Spain recently legalized at least 500,000 migrants, whose
rate of poverty stands at roughly three times that of the native population. Even in
the United States, the immigrant share of the U.S. population living in poverty since 1993 has
nearlydoubled to almost one in four; among the undocumented, nearly 30 percent
now live in abject poverty. Among Minnesota’s Somali immigrants, welfare use is
four times that of native-born families.
Rather than supercharging the economy — despite claims
that deportations are “sabotaging” commerce — most recent immigrants, according
to the Congressional Budget Office, now compete with other poor
people for living space, jobs, and social services. Although this effect is far from
universal, wages in some industries employing the undocumented, notably
construction and food manufacturing, have risen as deportations took effect.
To these economic concerns one has to add the disruptive
impact. Recently, migrants to Europe have been disproportionately involved in
crime. According to the World Prison Brief, foreign nationals made up 24.4 percent
of France’s prison population in 2025 despite accounting for roughly 7–8
percent of the population. The International Network for Immigration Research found
foreign nationals accounted for about 17 percent of France’s criminal suspects
— more than double their share of the population — with rates rising to four to
five times their share for vehicle theft, burglary, and unarmed robbery.
Much the same is evident in Catalonia where, according to
government statistics, foreigners accounted for 84.3
percent of arrests for theft in 2025, 73 percent for violent robbery, and 60
percent for sexual assault. In Italy, according to the Ministry of Justice, foreign citizens account for nearly one-third of all
prison inmates, despite representing around one-tenth of the resident
population.
Designed to reinvigorate aging societies, mass
immigration is reshaping Europe in ways many natives deplore. The
seemingly inexorable tide of migration threatens national identity, undermining principles of free speech and respect for traditions, creating what Marilynne Robinson describes as “a cerebral whiteout.” The European Union as well as the governments of France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Italy have pledged to crack down on migration.
This is recasting politics across the West. Uncontrolled
mass immigration under the Biden administration helped Donald Trump win his last presidential election. Support
for deportation of criminal aliens, and all the undocumented, has risen even among Democrats. Such sentiments did much to
elect Giorgia Meloni in Italy and could bring Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, or someone from Germany’s AFD to power.
Do We Still Need Masses of Immigrants?
To maintain their workforce, renew their culture and pay
their bills, the U.S. and other countries still need to keep some considerable amount of immigration. Right now,
the U.S. suffers shortages of skilled manufacturing workers, providers of medical
services, and workers in some technical jobs. But even this could change. The rise of artificial intelligence
may reduce demand for software
writers from India; tech companies have cut some 240,000 jobs since 2004.
Demand for low-end jobs may also diminish. Jobs requiring extensive manual labor dropped to 22 percent of all jobs in 2025, from 35 percent 50 years ago.
The rapid development of robots will likely hit all sorts of low-end jobs, from
fast-food preparation and package-handling to bed-making, elderly care, and toilet-cleaning. Even the ranks of drivers — one in five is foreign-born — will be culled by the rise of
autonomous vehicles.
Remaining low-wage immigrant workers, about 4 percent of the labor force, could benefit from a better
regulated reboot of the old U.S. Bracero Program, allowing foreign laborers to do
specific jobs without having them bring their families. Even Trump has been
forced to acknowledge that in fields such as agriculture and hospitality, immigrants, including the
undocumented, may be difficult to replace, at least in the near future.
Needed: A Focus on the Native-Born
The domestic working class seems an obvious if unintended
victim of mass migration. Since many of the newcomers are poor and
ill-educated, their presence in the workforce tends to retard wage growth at the lower ranks, noted a recent congressional study. But even in high-skilled professions, companies import workers at the exclusion of Americans. This approach is widely promoted by immigration lawyers and tech and other
U.S. firms, even if it works against the native-born STEM workers now suffering
increasingly high unemployment rates.
Rather than looking abroad for salvation, Western
countries might prioritize getting their disengaged workforce back toward
employment. Today an estimated one-third of American working-age males are neither in
school nor working, the highest percentage in a half century. In Europe, in the
U.K., and in Canada, as much as one-quarter to one-third of the population under 30 is neither
in school nor in a job.
Under such circumstances, blindly pushing for mass
immigration seems absurd. Increasingly, young people never enter the labor
pool, with record-low numbers taking summer jobs. Generation Z
constitutes the most “disengaged” workforce across the advanced world.
A mismatch of native workers and jobs drives fertility
rates even further down. Many are failing to launch, much less get married or
have offspring. In the U.S., the percentage of people 18 to 34 living at home,
notes Pew, is roughly one in three, but in Italy the percentage
reaches over 70 percent.
Stefano Becucci, professor of sociology at the University
of Florence, told me this lack of jobs affects many educated people, who would
rather sit at home than take a job, for example, in the artisan economy.
“People stay in school long, well into their thirties,” he observed over coffee
at the school’s suburban campus. “They stay because it’s difficult to get a job
in their field. You get a Ph.D. and expect a job that pays well. When they
don’t get one, they stay home.”
Even East Asia, once the heartland of family-centered
workaholics, is losing its workforce; thus Japan has witnessed the rise of “freeters,”permanent part-timers often living with their parents and
more interested in traveling, playing video games, and the like. In China, many
educated Millennials, faced with diminishing prospects, have abandoned striving in favor of “lying flat,”
taking part-time work rather than seeking out a career and a family.
Turning the Old Into an Asset
Many economists and politicians treat the aging
population as a giant liability. America, like the rest of the world, is older
than it has ever been: The population aged 65 and older is projected to increase
from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42 percent increase). Seniors’
share of the total population is projected to rise from 17 percent to 23
percent .
The late former Nixon Secretary of Commerce Peter
Peterson spent decades skewering retirees; in his polemic, Gray Dawn, he railed against their long retirement
“in subsidized leisure.” Brookings more recently declared that the rise of an aging
population “has no perceivable upsides.”
Yet in reality, seniors can be seen as an asset. Every
year approximately 26.3 percent of U.S. seniors aged 65 and older — 15 to 16
million strong — volunteer for a wide array of charitable activities. Another
40 percent informally help friends and neighbors, particularly those with
disabilities, with groceries and transportation. Altogether the Boomers — the
vast majority of seniors — and the aging Xers account for the largest group of volunteers in charities,
churches, and other service institutions. And an increasing number continue to work well into their
seventies and beyond. Nearly onein five Americans aged 65 and older are
currently working or looking for work, which is nearly double the participation
rate seen a few decades ago, according to Investopedia.
You also can see their predominance, and desire for engagement, in almost
any church, synagogue, or mosque, but also in many other forms of community
service. Several times a week, a group of seniors, mostly female, gather at the
Boys and Girls Club in San Juan Capistrano, a charming historic town on
California’s southern coast. They do not play bingo but spend an hour with
young children who need help with reading. Literacy is a gift cherished by these aging Boomers, while
it has faded among following generations.
“We fill a gap for kids with problems with reading,”
explains Janice Frenchette-Artinger, the executive director of the Parentis
Foundation, which sends 200 seniors, mostly well into their 70s and 80s, to
work with youngsters in Southern California. “Seniors want to be useful, and
they can help even if it’s just feeding dogs. It’s a reason to be alive.”
Age does not necessarily mean decrepitude or dependence.
Today’s elderly are far better-educated than in the past. In 1965 only 5
percent of seniors had college degrees; today that number is above 30 percent.
They are also more self-sufficient; today roughly 14 percent of seniors are
poor, compared with 30 percent in 1966. Not surprisingly, a growing percentage
do not use nursing and other senior facilities, wanting instead to age in
place.
Seniors “are reinventing old age,” Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, told the Wall
Street Journal. They are living longer, and more capably, well into their
80s and beyond, notes a recent Yale
study. Some become more functional, mentally and otherwise. Dementia rates are falling dramatically.
For decades, older workers embraced retirement as “the
great national repository of delayed gratification,” author Mark Freedman notes. But in this decade, many Boomers are starting businesses, launching new firms at a 22 percent
rate compared to 0.6 percent for the rest of the population. Bain estimates that worldwide, seniors will occupy 150
million jobs by 2030, providing up to a quarter of the workforce in some
countries.
Yet some describe the seniors, as The Atlantic put it, as a corrupt gerontocracy that
has “amassed disproportionate wealth and power.” The New York Times,
nearly two-thirds of whose readers are over 50, ran a column called “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” penned
by Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale and author of Gerontocracy
in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About
It. Moyn’s program embraces moves to confiscate the wealth of Boomers, all of whom are now over
60, and to hand it over to younger generations.
This resentment has roots in reality: In the U.S. at
least, less than half of Millennials are doing better than their
parents. A Deloitte study projects that Millennials (Americans born 1981 to 1996) will hold barely
16 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2030, when they will be the largest adult
generation by far. By then, the preceding Generation X, born between 1965 and
1980, will hold 31 percent, while the even older boomers will still control 45
percent.
Over time, of course, many young people will benefit from
inheriting the roughly $4.6 trillion in property — $2.4 trillion in the U.S.
alone. But some on the socialist-minded left see seizing these assets,
particularly those of the successful, sooner as an ideal way to power.
To be sure, not all seniors are doing well. Optimism about aging, notes Pew, tends to follow income and
savings. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. retirees have insufficient
savings, a trend made worse by inflation, and 20 percent have already burned through their
savings. Longer lifespans will add to that pressure. Demand for more transfers
to seniors could further intensify the generational conflict even as they
require the assistance of children and grandchildren, if they have
any.
There are better alternatives than confiscating Boomer
wealth or bringing poverty back to working-class seniors. The generations need
each other. More than two-thirds of grandparents are caregivers who usually work for free,
often on a regular or even daily basis, providing over $700 billion for the
economy by allowing parents to work or go to school. Emerging new technologies, notably autonomous vehicles, also offer
the prospect of greater mobility.
Seniors could prove a potential bulwark against a
shrinking labor force. Today, 23.2 percent of U.S. workers are older than 55, up 17.3 percent over the past decade,
according to one analysis. Sadly, in some societies, largely in the European
welfare states, working after 60 or 65 is discouraged. In places such as Spain and France, less than 10 percent of people between 65
and 70 are employed. They are missing an enormous opportunity to shore up a
dwindling workforce.
Dealing Successfully with the New Demographics
Changes such as raising the retirement age could encourage people to work
longer, reducing the need for mass migration and filling critical market
niches. And productivity gains, as one MIT paper recently argued, might make up for a
declining workforce, further enhanced by artificial intelligence. As we can see
in some depopulating parts of the country, it may be possible to achieve what
economist Paul Gottlieb calls “growth without growth.”
Under any reasonable scenario, slow population growth and
increased aging seem inevitable. But rapid depopulation and generational war are
not, although government may not be the best at providing solutions. State
attempts in Italy to lower taxes on diapers and provide incentives for childbearing
have barely moved the needle. Generous handouts to families have failed.
“Markets,” notes demographer Nick
Eberstadt, “cannot cure social pathologies.”
Ultimately the key lies in rekindling the familial values that have long buttressed society. A
potential return to faith might help, whereas the decline in
religious commitment, notably among Catholics, has had a devastating effect on fertility rates.
Some religious subcultures, like the Amish, Mormons, and
Orthodox Jews, enjoy far higher birth rates. Evangelicals, a far larger group,
also demonstrate a slightly higher fertility rate.
“Culture is the only solution,” Sebastiano Mattefone, a
leading Italian political theorist, told me outside his tree-lined Rome campus.
Mexican immigrant kids, surrounded by a wide family network, experience appreciably fewer mental health problems than kids born
here. Not everything boils down to money or efficiency. Religious values gaining some ground among the young could
lift the current low fertility. It seems that some parents are getting the
point: Remarkably, the time spent with kids is now twice what it was 50 years
ago.
As the late Karl Zinsmeister notes in his last book, The Natural
Family, the family is critical to the survival of civilization, a
functioning economy, and a sense of purpose. The priority should be not to
import our future wholesale, but nurture what G. K. Chesterton described as “the factory that
manufactures mankind.” The demographic crisis calls most of all for a new
humanism that relishes the creation of children, albeit in far smaller
batches, prioritizes the concerns of our own working class, and taps the
energies and wisdom of seniors. Demographics may well be destiny, but not
necessarily a precursor to a bleak one.
