Birthrate in Poland is still declining
That said, birth date decline is not uniform around the world. And countries like Japan have bad immigration policies. With Japanese people living longer and longer, the ratio of younger to older is severely skewed. This is not a good situation to be in.
Interesting times ahead
It is when your social security framework depends on an ever-growing population.
Hey, I guess that makes it a pyramid scheme, doesn't it. Interesting.
It is a pyramid scheme, but so is the rest of our debt fueled societies.
Bad in the sense that they can have a shrinking population without ceding their country to foreigners, without sacrificing their nationhood on the altar of economy?
As you say, we are at 8 billion already, how many more can the planet support? Well, think globally, act locally: how many can Japan support? Reducing population one country at a time is much easier than the global coordination problem of reducing it for the entire world.
How can you at once be aware that the global population is already too large, yet demand each country have perpetual population growth, either through birthrate or immigration?
And Immigration won't fix all their population issues either. It is just one of the ways to handle the population crisis.
You're just suggesting they do it slowly. Salami slicing to the same conclusion.
Maybe it would be different if you didn't have large cultural groups who could form them? But then again, there aren't any Polish parallel societies in Germany (and ~2% immigrated or have an ancestor that came from Poland), and after a generation, you can only tell them apart from the rest of the population by their last name.
My long term bet is that Japan is ultimately in a better spot with a declining population and restrictive immigration, rather than Western societies who are poaching from the third world to account for their own shortfalls. I predict the end result from the latter case will be a lot of unhappiness for all parties involved.
Declining is not bad. Declining too fast seems to be bad, because then society will go through a dire strait with too much people becoming elderly simultaneously, without enough young people around for proper support.
Yes, a shrinking society is bad.