A Record-High Global Population is an Opportunity for Immigration for Countries Seeing Population Shrinkage

Living in Japan, it can be hard to imagine that humanity is still growing. Even as the country is shrinking by more than 600,000 people a year and face a dire shortage of manpower in the decades moving forward, the world is hitting 8 billion in population, based on recent estimates, driven by continuing population growth in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. With India set to overtake China in population in a few years, and several African countries moving up the world's most populated rankings, the corresponding center of human gravity is bound to shift over time.

The fact that the world continues to grow while Japan shrinks not only shows that Japan bucks a global trend, but that the manpower issue that the country faces is not an inevitable one that many so-called "experts" proclaim it to be. While many casual observers lament why the socioeconomic structure of the country has led to such a low-birth culture, their automatic assumption that low birth is equated with a smaller population is not exactly a straightforward one. The fact that the Japanese are not having kids does not mean others are not either.

Indeed, as Japan suffers a labor shortage, others seem to have the opposite problem. Even in Japan's near abroad, China and South Korea are both seeing newsworthy levels of youth unemployment, especially among highly educated university graduates coming straight out of school, despite both countries recording ever-lower levels of births and population growth. For places further away with less dynamic economies, even higher levels of unemployment present local residents with immediate questions of why there are so many people, not so few.

Put simply, the world does not have a question of whether there is a problem with too many or too few people. Rather than, it is simply a matter of distribution problem, with too many people located where they cannot most efficiently and effectively develop their fullest human potential, all the while the places that can offer those opportunities are often closed to outsiders in various ways. Removing the barriers for people to move from geographies where they are too many people to those without enough would make the world's "population problem' a non-issue.

There is nowhere where the distribution problem is so well-illustrated than in Japan. With a population that has been taught that they are culturally exceptional and thus highly averse to immigration, Japan nonetheless has since a rapid influx of foreign residents through every non-immigrant legal status, from students and spouses to trainees and other "special activities." While most of these visa statuses suggest that the visa holders are supposed to go back to their home countries after some time, in reality, many stayed on for decades, acquiring permanent residency and even citizenship.

Despite the born-and-bred Japanese persistently denying that the immigrants are Japanese in any cultural way, these foreigners have become an indispensable part of the local economy, as workers staffing jobs that attract few Japanese citizens, and as consumers that spend a bulk of their earnings with the country. Some, especially those who graduated from the country's top universities, have joined the most dynamic Japanese companies or even started their own, helping to stimulate the Japanese economy by creating brand-new global linkages.

As the Japanese population continues to shrink, there is no reason that what is already happening today cannot be done at a greater scale. As the existing manpower shortage in Japan continues to grow, the most natural solution is to bring in more foreign workers, very much like the country already does. And as some remote towns of the country disappear with a lack of both residents and economic opportunities, they may only be saved by bringing in foreign residents. Spurned by the Japanese, some jobs and towns can only be saved by the non-Japanese.

The continued growth of humanity can be interpreted in two opposite ways. More people put pressure on the limited resources of our planet and opportunities where the economy remains weak. But for economies to grow, more people are needed, to both produce and consume, creating value out of those limited resources. A smaller population surely will be good for nature, but in the long-term, it cannot be good for humanity as a whole. As Japan continues to come to terms with its population shrinkage, it is the latter that it should continue to remind itself of.