POPULATION GROWTH (2)

Denmark's population has grown only slowly during the past five years; by just 115,000, out of a total of more than 5.5 million. But what is really interesting/worrying is that only 15,000 of those people were Danes; the rest were immigrants of one kind or another, split roughly half and half between "western" and "non-western". The fact of the matter is that Denmark, like many European countries, is simply not producing enough babies. Indeed, it is producing fewer and fewer; 55,436 new Danes were born in 2007, but only 45,466 in 2013, a fall of 18%.

What is depressing about these statistics is not the numbers themselves, but politicians' attitudes to them. The leaders of all the political parties a) know these facts and b) know that doing anything about it today would take at least 20 years to produce an effect. Yet they continue to prattle on (eg as part of the current European election campaigns) that it should not be easy for immigrants to enter Denmark, since the country can easily afford its welfare system without them. This Panglossian view of things is going to end in tears, the only question is when.

Walter Blotscher