The Great Transformation?

This report examines one of the most heated claims in contemporary politics: that the Western world is collapsing because of low native birth rates, large-scale immigration, the growth of minority populations and the cultural changes these bring. It treats that claim as a set of testable propositions, not as a premise or as a taboo. Some parts of the thesis rest on hard, uncontroversial numbers. European fertility has been below replacement for half a century. Deaths now outnumber births across the EU. Large cities on both sides of the Atlantic no longer have an ethnic majority. Other parts, most notably the idea that minorities are out-reproducing natives at a pace that drives the change, do not survive contact with the data. The aim is to separate the two, to quantify what is happening, and to set out plausible paths forward.

The West is not collapsing in any literal sense. It is going through the fastest change in population size, age structure and ethnic composition in its modern history, and its institutions are only partly adapted to it. The EU total fertility rate reached a record low of 1.34 in 2024, 36 per cent below replacement; annual EU-27 births have fallen 47 per cent since 1961, from 6.66 million to 3.55 million; the foreign-born share of the EU-27 population stood at 14.4 per cent in January 2025, against 10.0 per cent in 2015; and 23.8 per cent of EU births in 2024 were to foreign-born mothers, rising to 32–36 per cent in Germany, Spain, Austria and Belgium. In the United States, the non-Hispanic white share is 47.5 per cent among residents under 18 against 73.6 per cent among those 65 and over.

A claim-by-claim scorecard separates what the evidence supports from what it does not. Supported: that native European populations are in demographic decline, that Western societies are ageing substantially, that immigration is rapidly changing ethnic composition, and that majority-minority cities are already a present-day fact in the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Canada and the US. Not supported: that minorities reproduce rapidly enough to drive the change. Immigrant fertility exceeds native fertility by a modest 0.4 to 0.6 children per woman, shrinks across generations, and is falling in origin countries; foreign-citizen women in Germany have a fertility rate of 1.78, below replacement, and US Hispanic fertility has fallen from about 3.0 in 2007 to 1.93. Composition is changing mainly because of migration flows and age structure, not high minority birth rates.

Ageing rather than shrinking is the main economic shock: the EU old-age dependency ratio rises from 33 in 2022 to about 50 by 2050 in every scenario, reaching 58 by 2100 under high migration and 69 under none. Integration is uneven rather than uniformly failing, cohesion costs are measurable but smaller than often claimed, and politics has absorbed the shock first — parties campaigning mainly on immigration restriction now take 15 to 30 per cent of the national vote across most of western Europe, up from low single digits in the 2000s. Of four scenarios to 2075, the outcome closest to collapse requires high inflows combined with weak integration and economic stagnation; it is plausible in specific countries and cities but is not the central case for the West as a whole. The outlook depends on integration capacity more than on immigration numbers.

The report does not endorse the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that demographic change is being deliberately orchestrated to displace a population. That is a claim about intent, and no evidence supports it. Demographic change itself is real and measurable, and refusing to discuss it openly has arguably fuelled the conspiracy narrative. The report describes the change; it does not attribute it to a plot.