Article here. Excerpt:
'Which leaves France. France has a legitimately great fertility rate: 2.08—which is within spitting distance of the replacement rate. But is French fertility driven by its daycare centers? Not so much. Separate out the fertility rates of native-born Frenchwomen from the foreign-born population and you see a tremendous divide. Native-born French women have a TFR around 1.7. Foreign-born French women are much higher, probably north of 2.8. (Finding hard numbers here is difficult because it is taboo in France to make such demographic distinctions. Which means that in order for French demographers to get the same numbers our Census Bureau puts out every year, they have to hand-count (and sort) birth records. For a good discussion of all of this, see Christopher Caldwell’s definitive Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.)
What the gulf between native- and foreign-born French fertility suggests is that daycare centers and gender equality have only helped France so much—about as much, actually, as they’ve helped Scandinavia. What really gives France its demographic boost has been immigration which, in the French experience, has also been a source of many problems.
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But anyone who looks at demographic decline and says, “Hey, just give us nationalized daycare and the problem takes care of itself” is either uninformed, or trying to sell you something.
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Twenty-three percent of German men—that’s not a typo, 23 percent—said that “zero” was the ideal family size. There probably aren’t public policy solutions to a cultural worldview like that.'
