In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.
And he's not alone.
"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.
"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."
It's not a solution because, with a few exceptions, standards of living (and therefore reasons to not immigrate) are rising in most of the world, so in a few decades there likely won't be enough migrants to go around.
If it looks like only shareholders are having problems because of low birthrates in Japan and South Korea, then you should learn more about those places.
Bruh there’s 8 billion people on the planet. We don’t need more. We won’t be running out of migrants any time soon.
But you're forgetting the key rule of capitalism. Line must always go up forever. That means population must always go up to make more workers and consumers. Birthrates are dropping pretty much across the board. The earth is currently projected to hit it's peak population around 2086. Developing countries eventually become industrialized nations. Eventually there will be fewer reasons to emigrate from those countries. Both of those things combined will lead to fewer available migrant workers in "first world" countries.
Sure, this isn't likely to be an issue any time soon but within a generation or two it will start to become an issue. When you're running a country then you really should be planning for the future like that.
Of course the correct fix for that issue isn't to force people to have more children; it's to fix capitalism so that infinite growth isn't a central element. But fixing capitalism would mean billionares wouldn't be able to afford to buy every politician so the politicians won't let that happen.
Don’t worry climate change will ensure we never run out of migrants.
However, climate change may also mean that we hit the population cap sooner.
Pretty sure we hit that awhile ago.
There's 8 billion sure, but migrants only exist because of the power imbalance between the Western hegemony and everyone else. As standards of living improve globally, people become less willing to migrate as they're able to pursue a sustainable future in their home country.
Thankfully, climate change will cause widespread disaster and ruin areas once habitable, which should allow for a healthy baseline of migration, and the West can always destabilize a few more countries if they really need more cheap labor.