My Mistake

 

In 2010, over 10% of all South Korean marriages had at least one immigrant partner, and the trend seemed ever upward. It wasn't. The authorities responded by making immigration a lot harder for the foreign wives of lonely South Korean men (Statistics Korea 2021, p. 1)

 

  

In 2011, Faustino John Lim (2011) wrote about the changing demographics of South Korea, particularly its rural areas, and predicted that by 2020 a third of all children in the country would be born to non-Korean mothers.

 

Currently, a third of all marriages occurring in South Korea's rural areas involve migrant wives—mostly from China and Southeast Asia—who have been matched with South Korean men. An increasing gender imbalance tilting toward males ensures this phenomenon will continue, with jarring implications for the myth of Korean ethnic homogeneity.

 

In June, the government announced that the number of children with at least one parent of non-Korean heritage reached 150,000 this year, a number that has increased fourfold over the last four years. They are expected to number over 1.6 million by 2020, with a third of all children born that year the offspring of international unions.

 

I quoted that prediction in several of my posts, including one that appeared only three years ago. How correct was that prediction? And how correct was I in accepting it?

 

In 2020, 6% of Korea's live births had at least one immigrant parent. Of those births, 67% were to a Korean father and a non-Korean mother, 13.2% to the reverse, and 19.9% to naturalized residents (Statistics Korea 2021, p. 4).

 

There's a big difference between 6% and one third. Was that forecast unrealistic in 2011? Or did something happen afterwards to throw it off? I would say the latter. Specifically, it was thrown off by three factors:

 

·         The year 2011 saw the beginning of a crackdown on visa applications for mail-order wives. "International marriages" fell from a high of 35,100 in 2010 to a low of 21,700 in 2016 (Statistics Korea 2021, p. 1). The authorities seem to have initially enforced the existing visa requirements with more rigour. Then, in 2014, the government introduced several new rules: a Korean language requirement for the foreign spouse; income and housing requirements for the Korean sponsor; a 5-year ban on Koreans sponsoring a second foreign spouse (because of divorce); and a 3-year ban on naturalized immigrants sponsoring a foreign spouse (An 2019, pp. 102-103).

 

·         The fertility of native-born Koreans has declined, but so has the fertility of immigrant mothers. There has been a decrease in total live births to immigrants since 2012, despite an increase in the total immigrant population (Statistics Korea 2021, p. 4).

 

·         The COVID-19 pandemic has depressed both immigration and fertility.  Immigrant marriages fell from 24,700 in 2019 to 16,200 in 2020. Births to immigrants fell from 17,900 in 2019 to 16,400 in 2020.

 

The first factor is called the "observer effect." You cannot make an observation without affecting the thing you observe, perhaps to the point of invalidating your observation. When, in 2011, Faustino Lim predicted that a third of all births would be born to non-Korean mothers by 2020, the authorities responded by making immigration a lot harder for foreign women.

 

The other two factors have been noted elsewhere. In the United States, fertility has fallen among immigrant groups, particularly Hispanics. We are seeing, in fact, a dramatic drop in fertility throughout the world, the notable exceptions being much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Muslim world. Finally, the pandemic has reduced both fertility and international migration. Things may return to normal once it ends. Or maybe not. The pandemic may be acting as an accelerant of existing social trends (Frost 2020).

 

Does this mean that South Korea has dodged the bullet of demographic replacement? It depends on what happens to fertility and immigration once the pandemic is over. In 2020, the country's fertility rate fell to 0.84 children per woman, the lowest in the world (Reuters 2021). At that level, it doesn't take much to cause rapid demographic change. Such change could happen especially fast if citizenship is given to the growing population of legal and illegal migrants:

 

The country currently allows migrants to fill labor shortages, but soon it may have to allow greater immigration to help augment its aging, shrinking population.

 

... Chung Ki-seon, a migration expert at Seoul National University, says that South Korea is taking in migrants because it needs to supplement its agriculture, fishing, construction and manufacturing workforce, and not to address a demographic imbalance.

She predicts that situation will change over the next decade, as the country reaches a turning point that will necessitate a policy shift.

 

"The approximate age of the [Korean] people working the fields right now is over 70," she says. "And once they reach 75 or older, it will be hard for them to remain in the workforce."

 

... The pandemic cut off the inflow of thousands of legally employed migrant workers from Southeast Asia and countries as far away as Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Chung says 5,000 new seasonal laborers were supposed to come into the country to work for 90 days or less last year. But none of them could enter.

 

As a result, Chung says, "the farms rely mostly on illegal immigrants, who fill 80% to 90% of that shortage." There are more than 392,000 undocumented workers in the country. (Kuhn 2021)

 

References

 

An, J. (2019). Marriage Migration and National Boundary-Making: A Comparative Study of Marriage Migration in South Korea and Canada. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa

https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/etd/ddf5cf04-0bc0-4f75-91e4-02e69fa6170d/etd_pdf/b24af8c15a8741b50dc5c0e1b3d45b2e/an-marriagemigrationandnationalboundarymaking.pdf

 

Frost, P. (2019). South Korea at the crossroads. Evo and Proud, August 20

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/08/south-korea-at-crossroads.html  

 

Frost, P. (2020). An Accelerant of Social Change? The Spanish Flu of 1918-19. International Political Anthropology Journal 13(2): 123-133.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4295574

 

Frost, P. (2021). Damunwha in South Korea: A case study of divergences in cognition and behavior. Advances in Anthropology 11(2): 153-162.

https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2021.112010  

 

Kuhn, A. (2021). As Workforce Ages, South Korea Increasingly Depends on Migrant Labor. NPR

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1001194446/as-workforce-ages-south-korea-increasingly-depends-on-migrant-labor

 

Lim, T. (2011). Korea's multicultural future? The Diplomat, July 20

https://thediplomat.com/2011/07/south-koreas-multiethnic-future/   

 

Reuters (2021). South Korea's fertility rate falls to lowest in the world.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-fertility-rate-idUSKBN2AO0UH

 

Statistics Korea. (2021). Vital Statistics of Immigrants in 2020.

http://kostat.go.kr/portal/eng/pressReleases/1/index.board?bmode=read&aSeq=415168  

Not getting the concept

 

In selling mass immigration to the public, Japan’s government is faced with a semantic problem. Many have trouble understanding the concept, i.e., foreigners can come in large numbers, receive citizenship, and be treated as if they really are Japanese. (Wikicommons – Maya-Anaïs Yataghène)

 

 

An ideology will spread more easily among people who already understand its concepts, and such understanding is made easier by a common language. Conversely, an ideology will spread less easily across a language boundary. The problem is not simply one of translating the words but also one of reformulating the concepts, which may seem less familiar in another language and culture.

 

For that reason, globalism has spread unevenly around the world. It has penetrated the thinking of nations that widely use English as a first language, especially their chattering classes. It has less easily penetrated where English is poorly understood. This has been the case in East Asia, especially Japan.

 

The Japanese exception

 

That country is linguistically isolated from the English-speaking world to a high degree, despite close economic ties. In 2019, Japan ranked 53rd in English proficiency out of a hundred non-English-speaking countries, down from 49th the year before. Even China had a better ranking (Nippon.com, 2019).

 

Japan’s linguistic isolation is part of a tendency toward cultural isolation that goes back to the two-century-long period of sakoku ("closed country"), when the government forbade Japanese nationals to go abroad and severely limited trade with other countries. That policy didn't fully end when Japan opened up to the world in the mid-nineteenth century. There has continued to be an unwritten policy of protecting Japanese culture and identity.

 

This isolationist tendency is now viewed as a problem by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Because of a very low birth rate, the population shrank by about 1.7 million between 2010 and 2018 and is projected to lose another 20 million by 2045 (Davison and Peng 2021). Stopping this demographic decline will require radical changes to the economy, particularly the balance between work and home life. There is also a deeper problem with consumer culture: advertising tends to promote the lifestyle of singles, since they have the most disposable income. Corporate advertising thus projects images of happy carefree singles, and such images influence how ordinary people see themselves.

 

While some moves have been made to improve work/life balance in Japan, fertility will not immediately return to replacement levels, even with generous incentives. We’re dealing with ingrained attitudes, as well as an uncooperative consumer culture. Policy makers are thus tempted by a seemingly easier solution—mass immigration—and that seems to be where they’re heading:

 

[…] some scholars and policymakers have called for a vigorous increase in the number of immigrants admitted to the country. [...] Sakanaka (2015), for example, argues that Japan would need to accept 10 million immigrants over the next 50 years (an average of 200,000 per year) to sustain its population and economy. (Davison and Peng 2021)

 

In 2014, a government commission came out in favor of increased immigration: "With the falling birthrate, in order to raise productivity, we will strategically bring in foreign talent (gaikoku jinzai) as we encourage a national debate, and we will design the development of our interactions with them" (Roberts 2018, 90).

 

A matter of semantics

 

In selling mass immigration to the public, the government is faced with a semantic problem. Many have trouble understanding the concept, i.e., foreigners can come in large numbers, receive citizenship, and be treated as if they really are Japanese. This was a finding from in-depth interviews with people from all walks of life:

 

An unexpected finding of our research was that the notion of immigration as we know it in the West — migration to a foreign country with the intention to settle as a permanent resident or naturalised citizen — was somewhat foreign to many of our interview participants. When asked for their opinions on immigration, many participants assumed the term 'immigrant' (imin) was synonymous with 'temporary foreign worker' (gaikokujin rodosha) and that 'immigration policy' (imin seisaku) was inclusive of temporary worker programmes like the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that bring in up to 1000 nursing and care work interns from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam each year. (Davison and Peng 2021)

 

This misunderstanding can be seen in the following exchange between the interviewer (Davison) and nurses at a hospital:

 

Participant:

There's one thing I don't get. When you say immigration ... if someone likes Japan and wants to live here ... Is that the kind of person you have in mind? Or someone who just wants to come here for a short time to make some money ... Is there a difference between those kind of people? When you say immigrants ... I don't understand the concept.

 

Davison:

I mean people who come here and get citizenship, Japanese citizenship.

 

Participant:

Get Japanese citizenship? So they're Japanese?

 

Most of the interviewees were initially neutral or favorable toward immigration. They often changed their minds when told that immigrants are "people who come to Japan with the intention to settle in the country and perhaps naturalise as Japanese citizens" (Davison 2021). This confusion may be due to government discourse on the subject:

 

For example, 'immigration policy' is frequently presented as 'acceptance of foreign workers policy' (gaikokujin rodosha ukeire seisaku) and, in official messaging, the implication of permanent settlement is often left unstated. (Davison 2021)

 

To some degree, the confusion may be deliberate. The government may realize that immigration is more acceptable to the public if presented as a temporary worker program, even if it provides a path to permanent residency and citizenship.

 

 

References

 

Davison, J. and I. Peng. (2021). Views on immigration in Japan: identities, interests, and pragmatic divergence. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. January 8

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1862645

 

Nippon.com (2019). Japan's English Proficiency Drops among Non-English-Speaking Countries. December 4

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00594/japan%E2%80%99s-english-proficiency-drops-among-non-english-speaking-countries.html#:~:text=Japan%27s%20English%20Proficiency%20Drops%20Among%20Non%2DEnglish%2DSpeaking%20Countries,-Culture%20Language%20Dec&text=A%20survey%20has%20revealed%20that,both%20South%20Korea%20and%20China.

 

Roberts, G.S. (2018). An Immigration Policy by Any Other Name: Semantics of Immigration to Japan. Social Science Japan Journal 21 (1): 89-102. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyx033

The Japanese alternative

Japan is robotizing not only manufacturing but also the service sector (Wikicommons - Michael Ocampo)



In my last two posts I argued that South Korea has embraced not only ultra-low fertility but also mass immigration. In this, it has more in common with Western Europe and North America than with neighboring China and Japan.

China is out of step with Western immigration policy for understandable reasons: it is only now exhausting its reserves of cheap labor and, furthermore, has problematic relations with the West. But those reasons hardly apply to Japan—a Western ally with fewer and fewer people of working age. Yet that country has been going its own way on immigration, just as it has in other areas, notably automation and robotization.  In the West, robotics research is a low priority, except for military applications. In Japan, it is a high priority and has the stated aim of staving off immigration:

"Japan's push for automation has historically been driven by political and social resistance to large-scale immigration by non-Japanese, rooted in the idea that there would be a deep cultural incompatibility with such immigrants," says Grant Otsuki, a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington.

"In contrast, robots are generally seen as compatible with tradition and culture, or at least 'neutral', and therefore more acceptable than immigrants." (Townsend 2019)

Robotic beings have a good image in Japan, as shown by a spate of movies where a shy boy falls in love with a female android: Chobits (2002), Cyborg She (2008), and Q10 (2010). In contrast, we see a darker image in Western movies, such as the Terminator series, Ex Machina (2015), and Blade Runner (1982 and 2017).

Keep in mind that culture is upstream from policy. If you think movies are made only to provide entertainment, you probably also believe that newspapers serve only to cover the news and that advertisements are used only to sell a specific good or service. Culture is an effective way to shape future policies.


South Korea and Japan: different responses to the same demographic crisis

The South Korean response

Although South Korea and Japan face the same demographic crisis, i.e., an aging society and a low birth rate, they have responded in very different ways. South Korea has greatly liberalized its immigration policy, both in law and in enforcement of the law. Since 1997 the country has opened up its labor market to guest workers and has relaxed enforcement to the point that half of all migrants are undocumented (Moon 2010).

Song (undated) sees a link between the beginning of large-scale labor immigration to his country and the IMF bailout of 1997. However, the "Memorandum on the Economic Program," written by the South Korean government in response to the IMF, says nothing specific about immigration. There is only a promise to implement "labor market reform" and take "further steps to improve labor market flexibility" (IMF 1997). Perhaps other promises were made off the record.

To gain support for large-scale immigration, the government began to promote multiculturalism from 2006 onward:

But the South Korean media also began to host fervent discussions of multiculturalism. In 2005-2006, the number of articles on the topic tripled from previous years. The media shift was echoed by a change in policy from the top, initially driven by President Roh Moo-hyun. The campaign then crossed ministerial divisions and party lines, surviving the changeover from the liberal Roh administration of 2003-2008 to the more conservative administration of President Lee Myung-bak. Lee's government sought both to persuade the public to embrace immigrants and to promote integration by educating new foreign-born brides in the intricacies of Korean culture. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family simultaneously started a campaign to persuade the public to accept multiculturalism. Immigration commissioners and the presidential committee on aging set multiculturalism as a national priority to combat a maturing society. South Korea was to become a "first-class nation, with foreigners" — a phrase echoed throughout government documents and speeches. (Palmer and Park 2018)

Watson (2010) ascribes this new policy to the neo-liberalism that has dominated both the Right and the Left, particularly since the IMF bailout of 1997:

For the conservative government, South Korean nationalism and democracy is fundamentally tied to the doctrine of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism refers to the flow of economic migrant labour and mobile global capital. This global environment also requires government policies to attract foreign migrants and workers into South Korea's economy and society.

Multiculturalism is a state-led response to these global changes. The policies of multiculturalism define the present and future economic, security and cultural national strength of South Korea. Critics suggest that, in fact, the GNP regards multiculturalism as an instrumental policy of increasing national state power in this global environment. (Watson, 2010)

The GNP is the Grand National Party. It dominates the political right and resembles mainstream Republicanism in the United States:


The Japanese response

Meanwhile, Japan has been much less willing to open its borders, despite being East Asia's primary destination for foreigners. Its illegal immigrant population has actually declined through stronger law enforcement, and legal immigrants have been mostly overseas Japanese from Latin America. Last year, however, its parliament passed a law to bring in foreign workers for jobs in construction, agriculture, the hotel industry, cleaning, and elder care. Initially, 500,000 were slated to come over the next five years, but the total was cut to 345,000 (Denyer 2018; Nikkei 2018; Shigeta 2018).

Those numbers are still much lower than the 2.4 million foreign workers currently in South Korea, a much smaller country in size and population. In addition, Japan's guest workers will be paid the same as Japanese doing the same work (Denyer 2018). This is in stark contrast to South Korea, which has the largest wage gap between local and immigrant labor in the OECD (Hyun-ju 2015).

Japan is still criticized for not opening up enough. One example is this Washington Post article, whose author warns the U.S. against becoming another Japan:

Now, to be clear, Japan is a wondrous nation, with an ancient, complex culture, welcoming people, innovative industry — a great deal to teach the world. But Japan also is a country that admits few immigrants — and, as a result, it is an aging, shrinking nation. By 2030, more than half the country will be over age 50. By 2050 there will be more than three times as many old people (65 and over) as children (14 and under). Already, deaths substantially outnumber births. Its population of 127 million is forecast to shrink by a third over the next half-century. (Hiatt 2018)

Robotization may make life easier for Japan's growing numbers of elderly but will it pay for their pensions? Mind you, the same sort of question could be asked about low-wage immigration to the U.S.


Why is Japan so different?

A key reason seems to be a high degree of cultural autonomy and a correspondingly high degree of cultural isolation. The term "isolation" might seem strange for a country that does so much importing and exporting. Nonetheless, manufactured goods are not the same as beliefs. The latter are distributed not via shipping containers but through shared language and through shared discourse spaces in academia, entertainment, and the media.

Poor knowledge of English

English has become the language of globalism, and knowledge of English correlates worldwide with public acceptance of core globalist beliefs. In Japan, English is not widely used or understood, even among the well-educated:  

Although English is a compulsory subject in junior high and high school in this country, Japanese still have a hard time achieving even daily conversation levels. According to the most recent EF English Proficiency Index, the English level of Japanese is ranked 35th out of 72 countries. The top three are the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, which are all northern European nations. Among Asian countries, Singapore is placed sixth, Malaysia 12th, the Philippines 13th, India 22nd and South Korea 29th. Japan places between Russia and Uruguay. (Tsuboya-Newell 2017)

Sullivan and Schatz (2009) found that attitudes toward learning English correlated negatively with patriotism (defined as positive identification and affective attachment to one's country) and positively with nationalism, internationalism, and pro-U.S. attitudes. Here, "nationalism" is defined as "perceptions of national superiority and support for national dominance"—what Steve Sailer has dubbed "Invade the world, invite the world!" 

Relative isolation of academia

Academia can propagate a new discourse in several ways:

- by inculcating it in young adults

- by acting as a trusted gatekeeper that serves to distinguish between "correct" and "incorrect" discourse.

- by mobilizing scarce intellectual resources for the development and dissemination of "correct" discourse.

New forms of discourse, like globalism, cannot easily penetrate Japanese colleges and universities by means of overseas-trained leaders. Unlike the case in many other Asian countries, educational authorities prefer to select future leaders from within, attaching little importance to foreign experience and credentials for promotion within the system (Yonezawa et al. 2018, p. 235). Foreign-born professors are hired mostly for teaching English language and literature.

Relative isolation of policy makers

This relative isolation is true for Japanese in general, including policy makers. International organizations, like the IMF, have little input into public policy, in large part because Japan's debt is almost wholly Japanese-owned. This economic independence has been a longstanding characteristic of Japan and enjoys support not only from the political left but also from the political right:

In Japan, unlike many of the social democracies resisting capital movements, the most important political opposition came not from organized labor and a political Left anxious to prevent capital flight and to protect the welfare state; rather, it came from nominally "conservative" politicians; many bureaucratic agencies, including the MOF; and protected, cartelized sectors of the economy, including banks, securities houses, and insurance firms. (Pempel 1999, p. 911)

In the West, globalism coopted first the Right and then the Left. That process is still at an early stage in Japan.


Conclusion

I would like to conclude with three points: 

- Japan will be a nice place to visit during the troubled 2020s. The same decade will see South Korea become more and more like the West, especially the United States—in keeping with stated policy goals.

- English is the language not only of globalism but also of anti-globalism. Just as Japan will move toward globalism more slowly than the West, it will also move away more slowly ... when that time comes. As for South Korea, it will enter a period of polarization, perhaps violent polarization.

- Japan shows that the Western model of modernity is not the only one, or even the best. The Western model is a product of specific circumstances, particularly the presence of a large rentier class that feeds on growth while doing little to make growth sustainable. At home and abroad, our rentier class continually pushes for high rates of growth through expansion of the money supply, through mass immigration, and through rapid exploitation of resources that are either non-renewable or slowly renewable. 

Japan's slow-growth model is problematic in other ways, but it promises to be more sustainable in the long run.


References

Denyer, S. (2018). Japan passes controversial new immigration bill to attract foreign workers. The Washington Post. December 7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-passes-controversial-new-immigration-bill-to-attract-foreign-workers/2018/12/07/a76d8420-f9f3-11e8-863a-8972120646e0_story.html  

Hiatt, F. (2018). Anti-immigration Republicans have a decision to make about America's future. Washington Post January 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-immigration-america-will-stagnate/2018/01/28/e659aa94-02d5-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html

Hyun-ju. (2015). Korea's wage gap between local, foreign workers largest in OECD. The Korea Herald, September 9
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150909001162  

IMF (1997). Memorandum on the Economic Program. December 3.
https://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/120397.htm#memo  

Moon, S. (2010). Multicultural and Global Citizenship in the Transnational Age: The Case of South Korea. International Journal of Multicultural Education 12: 1-15.
https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/261 

Nikkei (2018). Abe vows to bring in more foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review. June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Abe-vows-to-bring-in-more-foreign-workers  

Palmer, J., and G.-Y. Park. (2018). South Koreans learn to love the Other. How to manufacture multiculturalism. Foreign Policy. July 16
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/south-koreans-learn-to-love-the-other-multiculturalism/  

Park, Y-B. (2017). South Korea Carefully Tests the Waters on Immigration, With a Focus on Temporary Workers. Migration Policy Institute, March 1
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-korea-carefully-tests-waters-immigration-focus-temporary-workers  

Pempel, T.J. (1999). Structural Gaiatsu: International Finance and Political Change in Japan. Comparative Political Studies 32: 907-932.

Shigeta, S. (2018). How Japan came around on foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review, June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/How-Japan-came-around-on-foreign-workers

Song, H-J. (undated). Immigration Policy in South Korea & Japan - A Comparative Perspective Theoretical framework. University of Tsukuba. International and Advanced Japanese Studies. PowerPoint presentation
http://japan.tsukuba.ac.jp/09225Song.pdf

Sullivan, N. and R.T. Schatz (2009). Effects of Japanese national identification on attitudes toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 33(6): 486-497
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147176709000236

Townsend, R. (2019). Japan's big dilemma: robots or immigrants? Asia Media Centre. March 1
https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/japans-big-dilemma-robots-or-immigrants/

Tsuboya- Newell, I. (2017). Why do Japanese have trouble learning English? The Japan Times, October 29
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/10/29/commentary/japan-commentary/japanese-trouble-learning-english/#.XWK2DHdFzct 

Watson, I. (2010). Multiculturalism in South Korea: A Critical Assessment. Journal of Contemporary Asia 40: 337-346.

Yonezawa, A., Y. Kitamura, B. Yamamoto, and T. Tokunaga. (2018). Japanese Education in a Global Age. Sociological Reflections and Future Directions. Springer. 
https://books.google.ca/books?id=shdnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

South Korea at the crossroads

By mid-century, immigrant workers will be almost as numerous as native-born workers (AINZ 2016)



Readers took exception to a population forecast in my last post: children of mixed parentage will make up a third of all South Korean births in 2020 (Lim 2011). Yet in 2015 they made up only 5% (Lim 2017). From 5% to one third—is that possible in only five years?

This forecast was tangential to my argument. Ultimately, the rate of population replacement is less important than the final outcome. All the same, this forecast seems to me plausible because South Korea's population is changing at an accelerating rate. There are three interacting reasons: 

Logarithmic increase

The increase in births of "multicultural children" is logarithmic, and not linear. In 2015, such children numbered 207,693 and more than half were under 6 years of age (Wiki- Multicultural Family in South Korea 2019). This factor, alone, will cause the annual number of such births to double or even triple between 2015 and 2020.

Declining fertility of native-born women

The total fertility rate declined from 1.25 births per woman in 2015 to 0.98 in 2018 (Steger 2019). The rate of decline is probably higher for native-born women. In addition, fewer of them are of childbearing age. These two factors are together driving down the total number of births. In one year alone, from 2017 to 2018, the birth rate fell by 8.6% (Steger 2019).

Shift in sources of foreign brides toward high-fertility countries

Initially, many foreign brides were ethnic Koreans from northeast China, where the total fertility rate is even lower, only 0.75 births per woman (Wang 2018). The ethnic mix is now shifting toward brides from Southeast Asia, where TFRs are three or four times higher: Philippines: 3 births per woman, Vietnam: 2 births per women, Indonesia: 2.1 births per woman, Cambodia 2.5 births per woman.



So will "multicultural children" make up 33% of all births in 2020? Forecasts can be wrong, but I don't think this one will be far off the mark. On the one hand, the annual number of such births seems to be more than doubling every five years. On the other hand, the total number of South Korean births is falling sharply. 


By the way, that forecast doesn't include labor immigration

Please note: this is not the whole story of population replacement in South Korea. There is also labor immigration, which will become more and more important demographically:

[...] The government has brought in an immigration policy that actively embraces immigrants. Last year, it formulated it in the low birth rate and aging measures and economic policy direction. It will actively accept immigration and solve various economic and social problems such as lack of population. Immigration policy will be in full swing after 2018.

[...] According to the data from the Korea Immigration Policy Institute, a steady influx of immigrants is needed to increase the potential growth rate by 1 percentage point. In 2020, there will be 4,994,000, and in 2030, 9,927,000. In 2035, 10,864,000 people will be needed, a quarter of the total working population of 41.75 million. In 2050, 16,116,000 people will be needed. In 2060, there will be 17,224,000 people—only 4 million people less than the domestic workforce (21,865,000 people). (AINZ 2016)

It’s not clear whether these immigrants and their children will be entitled to citizenship or will always be guest workers. In the end it doesn’t really matter. They will become a permanent presence in South Korea.


Can South Korea overcome its fertility crisis?

Fertility rates can rise, just as they can fall, as one commenter noted:

[...] there's no reason to think native Korean fertility is going to stay at such a low level indefinitely. Birth rates go up and down and yearly TFRs are just a snapshot. A number of European countries had fertility drop to very low levels and have seen their TFRs increase significantly, though usually not to replacement. Czech Republic, Romania, Russia and Georgia all come to mind. (Georgia's fertility is now at replacement actually, thanks to their church.) I could see South Korean fertility following that pattern.

Yes, fertility rates can rise, but vigorous action is needed to make them rise. I'm not convinced that such action will be sufficient in South Korea's case. Detailed analysis suggests that the fertility rate is so low because many young adults are trapped in "nonregular" jobs that offer little stability and no benefits, particularly maternity or parental leave. They are nonetheless expected to meet traditional preconditions for family formation:

Our analysis also indicates a very limited scope for future fertility increase in Korea, especially because larger families have almost vanished. [...] The low fertility will be sustained by irregular work contracts among younger people and a combination of unfavorable labor market conditions for women with families and the persistence of traditional gender roles and expectations regarding their family roles, household tasks, caring for dependent members, and childrearing. (Yoo and Sobotka 2018)

The example of South Korea suggests that social conservatives may be wrong in blaming the West's fertility crisis largely on the decline in traditional values and the rise of alternative sexual lifestyles (single motherhood, gay marriage, etc.). These factors are much less important in South Korea. Furthermore, an argument can be made that some traditional values are doing more harm than good in the current economic environment, both in South Korea and in the West, specifically the idea that parents shouldn't start a family until one of them has secure employment. In most cases, that precondition will never be met. 

The main problem is thus twofold: 1) young adults increasingly have precarious employment and are postponing childbearing until their situation becomes sufficiently stable; 2) the culture in general has shifted away from the family and toward employment as the ultimate meaning of life.

Young South Koreans should explore alternative means of gaining income and accept the idea that family life can be just as rewarding as work life. This will be difficult to do, however, if the South Korean government pursues its commitment to globalism. Young adults are increasingly thrown into competition with poorly paid foreign workers, either through outsourcing of employment to low-wage countries or through insourcing of low-wage workers for "3D jobs"—dirty, dangerous, and demeaning (Mundy 2013). 

Employers are in fact incentivized to bring in foreign workers. South Korea has the largest wage gap of OECD countries between local and immigrant labor, and the gap remains even when one controls for differences in work skills (Hyun-ju 2015). This use of immigrants to do "work that Koreans won't do" has the perverse effect of increasing such employment while reducing employment that can support a family. 


References

AINZ (2016). Population in 2750 South Korea, large-scale immigration government in progress. January 9
https://issuecollecter.tistory.com/178 

Hyun-ju. (2015). Korea's wage gap between local, foreign workers largest in OECD. The Korea Herald, September 9
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150909001162 

Lim, T. (2011). Korea's multicultural future? The Diplomat, July 20
https://thediplomat.com/2011/07/south-koreas-multiethnic-future/ 

Lim, T. (2017). The road to multiculturalism in South Korea. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, October 10
https://www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-edition/2017/10/10/the-road-to-multiculturalism-in-south-korea

Mundy, S. (2013). S Korea struggles to take in foreign workers. Financial Times, September 17
https://www.ft.com/content/afcdefd4-1c1c-11e3-b678-00144feab7de 

Steger, I. (2019). South Korea's birth rate just crashed to another alarming low. Quartz Daily Briefs, February 27
https://qz.com/1556910/south-koreas-birth-rate-just-crashed-to-another-alarming-low/  

Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3234861

Wikipedia (2019). Multicultural Family in South Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_family_in_South_Korea

Yoo, S.H. and T. Sobotka. (2018). Ultra-low fertility in South Korea: The role of the tempo effect. Demographic Research 38(22): 549-576.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26457056.pdf?acceptTC=true&coverpage=false  

Doing better in the promised land

View of Tel Aviv. Israel shows good intellectual achievement, but not the top intellectual achievement of Jews in the U.S. How come?

Why do Ashkenazi Jews do worse in Israel than in the United States? This question is raised by Heiner Rindermann in his new book Cognitive Capitalism. Israel is an advanced country and shows promise in certain areas, like nuclear power and certain high-tech goods. Yet it underperforms when compared with Jewish communities in the West. "There is clear evidence for good intellectual achievement; however, not for top intellectual achievement as from Western Ashkenazi Jews" (Rindermann 2018, p. 149).

Israel is 42% Ashkenazi, a proportion that works out to more than three and a half million. By comparison, American Jews number between 5.5 and 8 million, and their intellectual creativity—in whatever field you choose—has been many times greater. So what gives?

One reason is that the above figure of 42% includes the recent wave of Russian immigrants to Israel, and they are on average only half-Jewish (Wikipedia 2018). It is also possible that offspring of Ashkenazi-Sephardic or Ashkenazi-Mizrahi marriages tend to self-identify as Ashkenazi. 

A second reason is ideological. The Zionist movement sought to create a "new Jew," who would be less intellectual and more interested in other pursuits. Furthermore, Israel is home to over a million Haridim (strictly Orthodox Jews), who confine their intellectual pursuits to Torah study.

A third reason is that Israel is not a high-trust culture, at least not to the same extent as Western countries:

Statistics from Transparency International on corruption corroborate these political observations: while Scandinavian nations are leading in non-corruption, closely followed by (present and past) British and European countries, Israel comes at rank 37, after Botswana, [United Arab] Emirates and Chile. (Rindermann 2018, p. 150).

This is consistent with mainstream thinking. When Jews immigrated to the United States, they found a land of opportunity where they could use their abilities to the fullest. This narrative, however, is usually framed in terms of freedom from discrimination: America offered a haven from antisemitism. Just as importantly, however, it also offered a high-trust culture. Americans could generally be counted on to do what they said they would do and charge only what they said they would charge. When two Soviet journalists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, visited the U.S. in 1935, they were struck by the integrity of the average American:

The American sits in his office with his coat off and works. He works quietly, unobtrusively, without making any fuss. He is never late anywhere. He never hurries anywhere. He has only one telephone. No one waits for him in his reception room, because an appointment is usually made with absolute accuracy, and not a single extra minute is wasted during the interview.

[...] Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, "I'll do that," it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word—this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people. (Ilf and Petrov 1937)

Migration and productivity

The same could be said for other immigrant groups. People do better when they move from a low-trust culture to a high-trust one. They can fully realize their potential. We see this with PISA math scores. Asian American students do better than students in Asia, White American students do better than students in Europe, Hispanic American students do better than students in Latin America, and African American students do better than students in sub-Saharan Africa (Sailer 2013).

This benefit of migration is affirmed by mainstream economists, although they usually attribute migrant success to abstractions like "good government" and "good institutions"—as if these entities are not composed of flesh-and-blood people who think and act like other people of the same culture:

There are many reasons why this is so. Among them are that the lower earners usually live in societies with predatory governments that arbitrarily confiscate wealth, are rent asunder by civil war and other armed conflicts, and lack the social, political, and economic institutions that are the foundations for economic growth, as well as numerous other factors. By contrast, residents of developed countries face fewer political and social barriers to economic growth, thus incentivizing the long-term accumulation of the machines, knowledge, and human capital that propel the economy. (Nowrasteh 2016)

As a result, migrants are more productive in First World societies like the United States than they were in their home societies:

[...] the median worker from the developing world can expect a fourfold increase in wages by coming to the United States. Across the board, wage growth can range from a twofold increase for Dominicans to a 15-fold increase for Yemenis. Thus, just by moving to the United States, these workers will experience increases in income that few in the developed world can imagine. These gains do not come at the cost of Americans' losses, but from the increased productivity of the immigrant workers themselves. (Nowrasteh 2016)

Their productivity will increase because they are now interacting with a high-trust culture. They receive their supplies on time, and these supplies don't have to be checked and double-checked. The product of their labor is then distributed or further processed by people who do what they say they will do. More work gets done, and less time gets wasted.

This is the main argument for labor mobility. Workers from a Third World country can do better if moved to a First World country. This is not because they have become better workers. It's because they are now immersed in a culture that functions better.

So why not let people migrate from the Third World to the First World? Their productivity will rise, employers will get cheaper labor, and the global economy as a whole will benefit. It's a win-win, isn't it?

Well, no. If you fill a high-trust culture with people from low-trust societies, you'll eventually get .... another low-trust culture. You'll kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Parting thoughts

When I raise these points with other people, I soon run into disagreement, even when among people with open minds.

Disagreement often comes from a belief that immigrants will "assimilate." The habits of a low-trust culture will be shed and replaced with those of a high-trust one. To some extent, this does happen when immigrants are relatively few in number. As they become more numerous, however, the pressure to assimilate slackens and may even go into reverse. The pressure to assimilate is also weakened by new technologies, particularly the Internet, which are making it easier for migrants to live in their native culture anywhere on the planet.

There is also disagreement over what creates a high-trust culture. At one time this question used to interest social scientists, but now that interest has refocused on "whiteness studies." It seems that societies like Iceland function admirably because of their "white privilege."

Sarcasm aside, trust does matter. It has been key to the rise of Western societies to global dominance. But how is it created? I've argued that Western societies have extended the high-trust environment of the family to a much larger social context, specifically through a more individualistic mindset that is governed by universal moral rules, rather than by a dual morality that favors close kin over everyone else.

This high-trust mindset has four main components:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled from the entire moral community, as opposed to being ostracized by close kin.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. This help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy, i.e., a rule follower. In most human populations, affective empathy is largely confined to relations between a mother and her offspring. In northwest Europeans, it has become generalized to all community members (Frost 2017).

In addition, there is a fifth and historically more recent component: pacification of social relations. This is an outcome of the first component. Once violent individuals had become branded as immoral, they were removed from society with fanatical zealousness (Frost and Harpending 2015). Finally, there is increased cognitive ability, which I mention last partly because it receives too much attention in this sort of discussion and partly because it too may be relatively recent. Rindermann (2018, pp. 86-87) has argued that mean IQ rose in Western Europe during late medieval and post-medieval times as a result of the greater reproductive success of the nascent middle class.

All of the above components have medium to high heritability. If we wish to impose this mindset, we will be constrained by the underlying genotype. Guilt and empathy cannot be elicited from people who are not guilt-prone and empathic. Nor can such people be made to feel calm if they have exceeded their anger threshold. There remain only "carrot and stick" methods to make them act in ways they normally would not. As for cognitive ability, the room for improvement is slim. Any gains made during adolescence will largely "wash out" during adulthood.

That may not be the message you want to hear. And perhaps it is too pessimistic. Again, it depends on the numbers. It would also help if Christians were still interested in enforcing proper behavior. Nowadays, most aren't.

Finally, I should point out that there may be more than one way to build a high-trust culture. East Asian societies, for instance, rely more on rule adherence and less on affective empathy and guilt proneness (Frost 2015).

References

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. (2015). Two Paths. The Unz Review, January 24

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract

Ilf, I. and E. Petrov. (1937). Little Golden America

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=little+golden+america&btnG= 

Nowrasteh, A. (2016). The Case for More Immigration. Democracy. A Journal of Ideas. Fall. No. 42

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/42/the-case-for-more-immigration/

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Sailer, S. (2013). PISA racial results for Americans on Math. December 3, Steve Sailer. iSteve.

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-racial-results-for-americans-on.html

Wikipedia (2018). 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah