The West's Demographic Winter

Is birth-rate decline a sign that the West is experiencing a cultural bottleneck, and our way of life destined to whither and die on the vine?

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The following essay was first published in the third issue of Islander Magazine. It is now available exclusively for Substack subscribers.

In November [2024], the government’s Office for National Statistics offered bleak figures on Britain’s deleterious demographics. It recorded net migration at 728,000 between June 2023 - 2024. (1.2 million total.) It revised the 2022 - 2023 figure up to a net 906,000. 86 percent of new arrivals were from outside Europe, North America, and Australia — from the third world. As expected, they establish en masse ethnic enclaves with cultural and religious antagonisms toward the native host population. This was, as unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer admitted, ‘by design, not accident … To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders.’

Alongside this admission of unprecedented, deliberate demographic change, the ONS announced that Muhammad is the most popular baby name in England. In 2023, only 56 percent of live births were to white British mothers. That number was 74 percent in 2021; meaning an 18 percent fall in just two years. 37.3 percent of births were to parents where either one or both were born outside the UK. The same trend is happening in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands... Every single EU nation has a fertility rate below the 2.1 children-per-woman replacement rate.