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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

Not sure where you are but it feels that this is exactly what it's like in America. I am not sure why nobody really cares and I suspect by the time people try to do something about it, it won't be too late, but it's going to take a Herculean effort to fix. Mindset and structural support.

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It is. The only difference is that the US (and Canada) are way more welcoming of immigrants than South Korea or Japan. That's basically what's keeping them competitive. I'm also pretty sure that high birth rate from illegal south american immigrants keeps US population going. The legal immigrants have children but at a subsistence level, generally <= 2.

My understanding is that Japan requires dual Japan/US citizens to choose one citizenship when they turn 18. If Japan allowed dual citizenship, they could see dual citizens return and raise families. These dual citizens would enable Japan to maintain more homogeneity via immigration while also increasing population growth.

TFR for the United States is 1.84, while South American countries rage from 1.75 (Uruguay) to 2.26 (Bolivia)[1]. It's tricky to find data on how the US TFR breaks out demographically. It would be very interesting, to your point, to see if immigrant TFR just echos the origin country or if there's a debuff applied for living in the United States. Anecdotally, this feels true to me less more Traditional Catholic immigrant families from Mexico or El Salvador but I've no idea if the data backs it up.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...

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