Immigration and Population: How Much is Enough?

I recently stirred some people up with a post suggesting that there should be limits to immigration, and that doing so would help with the current recession. Most of the responses focused on economic arguments why immigration was beneficial, or how it was racist to limit immigration. Nobody addressed the central point, which is this: Continuous population growth is not possible. Given that developed countries like Canada and the United States have had increasing populations since their inception, and that the world is running into hard ecological limits to carrying capacity, it seems a sensible question to ask: How much is enough?

This is not an argument for or against immigration, but rather an attempt to get you to think about how much is enough. I am Canadian, and the current population of Canada is approximately 34 million. Canada has more land area than any other country except Russia, population 142 million. “Should” Canada aim for the same population?

Or how about the United States, population 310 million. Canada is larger than the U.S., so perhaps we should be aiming for a proportionally larger population? Of course the U.S. population is growing, too, so perhaps the upper limit is yet unknown. Canada is also larger than China, population 1.3 billion. China is taking drastic measures to reduce its population, so maybe that’s too many; how about a flat 1 billion? Is that “enough?”

If you’re Canadian, the idea of 966,000,000 more people living here is probably not appealing. Our cities would be enormous – tens of millions of people in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, plus tens and tens of millions more in many other cities. Can you imagine Halifax with 19 million people? That’s the population of Shanghai. Or Victoria with 39 million souls, the same as the Greater Tokyo Area?

How Much is Sustainable – and Desirable?

The questions we should be asking, that make sense to ask, are:

• How many people can the country sustain?
• How many people do the current residents want?

Perhaps the United States could support 3 billion people, if everyone lived in Soviet-style apartment blocks and ate meat produced in petri dishes, but is that what Americans want? At some point, those of us living in a country may make the decision that we want fewer people than the country could theoretically sustain.

There are multiple valid and moral reasons for doing so.

1. Margin of safety: It is foolish to populate to the limits of the environment. Then even a small amount of climate change, a crop failure, or some other problem becomes a major disaster. This has taken down many previous civilisations; see Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
2. Health of the planet: We have exceeded limits on the planet’s carrying capacity. It makes sense to limit population and reduce our impact until we are back in safe, sustainable territory. That also means that some countries should leave vast areas largely untouched, because these areas contribute to the health of the planet. Brazil should not raze the rainforest, for example, no matter how economically profitable it may be to do so.
3. Quality of life: More people and higher population density does not translate to a higher quality of life. My current city (Victoria, Canada) has a metro population of about 400,000. Increasing that to 4 million doesn’t make Victoria ‘better.’ The opposite is more likely true.

There is an Enough

Many environmentalists are quite comfortable with the question, “How much is enough?” when applied to individual lifestyle, but I have met few who do not get quite uncomfortable when the same question is asked of population.

The fact is that we do not know how many people Canada or the United States can sustain given the realities of climate change, peak oil, fisheries collapse, and so on. Population should be stabilised in every country as quickly as possibly, and many countries should be taking steps to reduce population.

Every region should conduct a Sustainability Audit to determine how much of the necessities of life, particularly food and water, are provided locally, and how much could be in the event of troubles. Subtract a conservative number from the latter, say one-third, and that’s the upper safe and sustainable limit. A region that survives only because of imports is counting on cheap transportation, a peaceful world, being able to outbid other areas in the event of shortages, and so on. This is unwise.

It’s the Ecology, Dammit

The economy is a subset of the ecology. Period. No ecology, no economy. Damaging the environment ultimately limits economic opportunities. Economic arguments for ever-increasing population are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how economically beneficial it is – in the short-term – to increase population, if in the long-term the ecology is undercut.

If our current economic model only works if the population is increasing, then we need to change the model.