While it's absolutely true that many couples refrain from having children due to financial reasons, many others simply don't want any. You can't really fix the latter, even if a lot more can and should be done for the former.
For immigration to succeed, you need a universal language like English, a thriving industry, and abundant opportunities to attract the cream of the crop. Essentially, you have to compete with countries like the US, Canada, and Australia—all of which offer better conditions for immigrants compared to majority of the places in Europe. Also, I don't know anyone that can get a job in the SV is excited to learn German and move there; let alone in the Nordics.
While these nations draw in the best and brightest, the EU ends up handling the leftovers: refugees and others in desperate situations. Then they complain about how immigrants have ruined their economy. Like, hello—you took in the most disadvantaged en masse; what exactly did you expect?
That's not the argument people want to hear.
Having a catastrophic event wipe out large swathes of the population... and large swathes of the population being old (so requiring disproportionate amounts of effort and contributing little to economic and social efforts) is very different. If 60% of a country 's population is in retirement homes, who will take care for them? Who will work all the jobs required to maintain a standard of living for everyone and pay for those retirees?
That's not really true, at least not with regards to Sweden. In the 50s-70s there was a massive immigration wave from Finland. During the Pinochet years, Sweden took in a lot of political refugees from Chile. During the war in Yugoslavia there was another huge wave of immigration into Sweden. Sweden's immigration clusterfuck wasn't so much due to lack of experience, but more based on a very naive assumption that this immigration wave would play out more or less just like the previous ones.
Isn't housing there also very expensive?
Public housing prices have gone up a lot (70-100% increase in last 5 years) but it is heavily subsidized for citizens who can buy directly from the Housing Development Board (HDB). Permanent residents cannot buy from HDB so they have to buy from the resale market where prices are sky high so they are bearing the brunt of it.
The "laziness" here isn't just the working parents to be.
Old people could help a great deal with child care, instead the boomer capitalist mindset is "retirement" and getting "taken care of".
That's the clear solution. The elderly have a clear obligation to help the younger productive generations raise kids.
They don't.
Aside from these issues are the saturation of entertainment/video games, emphasis on look at me consumption while raising kids just needs pragmatic consumption, feminism, birth control, abortion (I am pro choice but it has a demographic cost), overwork, porn, internet dating isn't aligned with long-term relationships, drop in religion.
It all combined to less means, less time, less interest.
Single consumers are what western capitalism is strongly optimized for, and the cultural bulwarks have basically collapsed.
I used to be worried about the infinite growth /consumption of capitalism, but urbanization is the precise weapon environmentalism needs. Nothing will work because the rich get richer off of all of this.
The medium term solution is immigration, which converts low resource consuming people to high resource consumption, but that's just a generational delay in the inevitable demographic decline.
It's hilarious we talk about AI simply slotting into the economy while consumer capitalism withers away the biological aspects over generations.
Its scifi come to life.