Not this lame "Europeans aren't having any babies meme" again. It varies a lot from country to country, but most of Europe is doing fine. Sweden, France and Germany have all experienced major increases in fertility over the past few years, in part thanks to pro-family programs that don't penalize couples for having kids and that make health care and education affordable. (You don't need a trust fund to send a kid to university in Germany-- the tuition is mostly taken care of if a student is qualified enough.) Although Italy, Poland and Spain indeed have rock-bottom fertility, most of the rest of the Continent has stabilized at a higher rate.
No, they're not at replacement fertility, but Europe's managed to stabilize its population anyway simply by importing co-ethnic Europeans from other countries, especially from Russia and the new eastern EU states (i.e., Eastern Europe demographically subsidizing Western Europe). There are also plenty of South Americans, North Americans (lots of USAers especially to Germany) and Australians who move to Europe every year if they have e.g. Italian-American or German-American roots, which also helps to maintain the population. Besides, world population has to stabilize at some point, and Europe is smart enough to hover at the decent level they're currently at, and thus avoid this idiotic growth-at-all-costs fallacy that's overwhelming the infrastructure and housing in US cities.
And no, there isn't any "Muslim takeover" in Europe. I worked for 4 years in Europe (mostly France and Belgium) and just returned to the States in late 2009, and when actual professionals do the surveys in places like France (even allowing for self-reporting, where a Muslim can profess a Muslim faith even without actively practicing it), the Muslim population is much lower than the scaremongers always bleat about-- more like 2-3% at most (probably lower) than 9-10%.
What the-sky-is-falling crowd always seems to forget, is that an immigrant to France from Algeria, Syria or Lebanon is NOT necessarily a Muslim. Those countries historically have had millions of Christians and Jews, and so millions of the North Africans and Middle Easterners coming to France have been Christian and Jewish (often even ethnic French themselves who'd settled there in the 1800's). Same with Germany-- Turkey used to have millions of (usually Orthodox) Christians, but that number has dwindled so much in recent decades in part because so many hundreds of thousands have come to settle in Germany. (And the Turks are dwarfed by the Poles and Russians anyway, who come in much higher numbers.) Same with the Egyptian Copts going to France and Germany. The problem is that some fool looked at the immigration numbers from North Africa and the Mideast to France, and just assumed that 6 million Muslims had poured into the Paris suburbs. They didn't even bother to check if those immigrants were actually Muslim to begin with.
The one exception is Britain, which really is undergoing a massive demographic transformation due to the flood of Middle Easterners (from e.g. Yemen), South Asians (Pakistan) and Africans from the ex-Commonwealth and other nations, millions of whom have indeed been Muslim. But this is not true for the rest of Europe. Americans too often stupidly project our own demographic change onto the rest of the Western world, but it's just not the case. The USA, it's true, will be majority non-White by about 2030-2040 or so, with the massive influx of mainly Latinos (not to mention our own large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants, like Britain). Same with Australia and their Indonesian/Pakistani/Sudanese influxes, and of course with Britain as pointed out. But these three countries are the marked exceptions in the Western world-- most of the West including all of Europe outside the UK, is very much stabilizing their population and staying European in terms of their people.
UNITY PROGRESS
Thanks for that valuable and useful information.
The above was in response to this article about Europe.
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