In this episode, we talk to David Lorento, a Swedish demographer who has some interesting theories about why women are leaving the traditional Western marriage market and taking up online dating in order to find a new, better mate.
00:18:00.560People who are watching this and are like, this phenomenon of passport bros actually marrying mail order brides or whatever you want to call them.
00:18:08.960I would ask yourself, do you live near an urban area?
00:18:12.200Because if you do, then you are not in one of the regions that is experiencing this and you may not be aware of the scale of what is happening.
00:18:20.940So I would not have discovered marriage migration if I lived in the U.S.
00:18:26.780You know, my parents, one is American, one is Swedish.
00:18:29.300They were debating whether for me to grow up in California or in Sweden.
00:18:34.820If I grew up in the U.S., I would never have discovered this because of the quality of the data.
00:18:38.860And also because by living in the countryside in Sweden where there's such a massive male abundance, you'd notice it firsthand.
00:18:49.460Well, I noticed it in right-wing culture in the U.S., and this is something that progressives just refuse to see.
00:18:57.340But in right-wing culture in the U.S., there is a large portion of right-wing men with either East Asian or Latin American wives.
00:19:06.160One of the ones I think of, like, just off the top of my head, a person who's always accused, even though there's, like, no evidence of this, Johnny Anomaly.
00:19:23.540You know, when you start thinking about marriage migration and then just count the number of people who have contributed to it on the right-wing, it's a long list, including Donald Trump.
00:19:35.720Exactly, Donald Trump, yeah, from one of these countries.
00:19:38.520But it is disproportionately going to be on the right-wing as well.
00:19:41.740Like, if you're like, I don't see this, are most of your friends right-wing?
00:19:44.980And the reason is, is because there is two right-wing men for every one right-wing woman, and for every one left-wing man, there are two left-leaning women.
00:19:54.380Which is why a lot of guys fake being left for strange.
00:19:58.320Yeah, well, also because left-leaning women are really unwilling to even cross the aisle.
00:20:02.980Yes, so left-leaning women are less likely to date across the aisle than right-leaning men are in the statistics.
00:20:09.880So due to all of these different factors, like gender-segregated economy, the political divide also dividing gender, and that there is a slightly male surplus now because we haven't had a mass male-killing event in a long time, and et cetera.
00:20:56.040And here you can see that basically the same picture, that Africa, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent overwhelmingly male, Eastern Europe overwhelmingly female, Latin America overwhelmingly female, and also Southeast Asia is overwhelmingly female as well.
00:21:14.560And one thing I've noticed for this, which is really bad for the host country, someone you're asking, like, when does this hurt?
00:21:20.040China, which already has a female shortage in every one of these has been a net contributor of women, which is going to magnify the problem of a lot of men in China not being able to find spices.
00:21:42.140If you're constantly losing women, you're probably going to need a fertility rate of 2.2 or 2.3 to just have a stable population.
00:21:49.860And I calculated that in Sweden, the number of women we're getting is so vast that we don't need a fertility rate of 2.1 to have a stable population.
00:21:59.320In fact, it would be growing at a considerable rate at that point.
00:22:03.460The stable fertility rate would be at 1.9.
00:22:18.220One of the things that you're pointing out, and we'll get to in a bit, but I think that this is important to note,
00:22:21.960that is part of this phenomenon, is a crash in the immigrants' fertility rate after they immigrate that has increased recently.
00:22:30.700In the same way that we've seen the Latin American fertility crash, it's one of the big changes that we're seeing now in fertility statistics,
00:22:36.400is that a lot of these Muslim populations that we thought would stay high fertility are not staying high fertility.
00:22:41.580And I suspect that a huge part of the problem for them is just not enough women,
00:22:46.660because they really have to marry within their culture.
00:22:49.760But they don't have to, but it's much harder to marry.
00:22:52.200And you have to think about now the interesting dating dynamics of immigrants' populations in the West,
00:22:58.980because a lot of these minority populations were overwhelmingly one gender,
00:23:03.800which means that they can't marry within the group.
00:23:06.500So if, for example, the Pakistani in Italy is 70% male,
00:23:14.220then most of those men are going to have to date outside of their own group,
00:25:58.280So when you have to, when you take into account these vast gender imbalances in various immigration groups,
00:26:05.000you realize that the female migration into Western world is going to have a long-term bigger effect on the demographics than the male surplus
00:26:14.860because the male surplus is just going to compete in a dating market that is benefiting fewer and fewer men.
00:26:23.780And since there is such abundance of men, that means that most men are going to lose that competition.
00:26:28.640Unfortunately, that's something I'm not, I'm not taking joy in this.
00:26:32.600This is, I'm deeply sympathetic to men who are just going to lose out on this through no fault of their own.
00:26:39.140Well, that's why you need grooming gangs.
00:26:40.880You're not going to get what's any other way.
00:26:49.700So suppose you have two cultures living next to each other.
00:26:52.000And this is why I think grooming gangs is such a common phenomenon.
00:26:54.680If one of the culture, the immigrant group is overwhelmingly male, and they come from a culture where men marry at a much younger age than they do within our culture.
00:27:04.320If they are courting women, even totally above board, and their culture treats women as essentially house slaves, and their culture doesn't really let women make many decisions.
00:27:13.740Even if they're doing everything above board from their own cultural perspective, it would appear from our cultural perspective to be a grooming gang because they would be targeting, because they do marry at a younger age in these countries.
00:27:27.260They would be appearing to treat these women as slaves afterwards, but that's normal in their country, and they would appear to, like, not let their women go outside much and stuff after that, but that's normal in their country.
00:27:39.220Yeah, yeah, they rear them towards subservience.
00:28:01.760So you can see here that the interesting thing about the UK is that since it's lost almost all of its industry, and a lot of its economy is focusing on education, it's caused the majority of all immigration into the UK to be women.
00:28:17.540And that means that most of Europe, most of the immigration from Europe to the UK is women because they come there to study.
00:28:25.920And, but when you look at outside of Europe, outside of the Western world, it's basically the same trends with Middle East, Indian subcontinent, North Africa, China, China over and over again.
00:28:56.560See, the number of countries was very limited.
00:28:59.240So, but it still shows the same trends with exception to Iran, which was fairly close to 50-50.
00:29:07.980I think that the Russia and Ukrainian situation with this is going to be way more impactful to their own populations than a lot of people realize right now.
00:29:15.420I think we're talking about almost ethnic cleansing levels of depopulation in some of these areas.
00:29:21.840So, yeah, Western Europe receiving a bit of a demographic boost from the war in Ukraine because you have all these women leaving Ukraine.
00:29:31.500And a lot of them will not return back home once there's peace again.
00:29:37.400So, I watch a number of Russian YouTube channels.
00:29:40.000And given that women are more left-leaning and are more influenced by the urban monoculture, a lot of women, you know, whether these are good women to marry or not, were sort of scared out of the country is one of the things I've seen with the war.
00:29:51.840Because of the online conversation around the war that made them feel uncomfortable staying.
00:29:57.520Yeah, a lot of the anti-war dissidents in Russia, there were a few million of them.
00:30:02.460They just left in the first year and two of the war.
00:30:07.140So, there was a significant depopulation and a lot of them were women.
00:30:11.600And I don't think they'll be returning back to Russia.
00:30:14.940So, that means that, yeah, it's just a really serious demographic decline.
00:30:19.780You're not going to – it's not going to be sufficient for a lot of countries to have just 2.1 children per woman.
00:30:26.220Some of these countries are going to need a little bit higher than that, which just makes the whole solution and, you know, the situation even worse.
00:30:35.160Well, the argument that Malcolm makes again and again is it's much worse than that because still in many of these developed countries, a huge portion of the population plans on having zero.
00:30:42.860So, there's even more overcorrection that has to be made.
00:30:46.340So, you know, but the point he's making, Simone, is look at like Latin America where we're seeing crashing fertility rates right now.
00:30:52.400This is where they're going to deal with the biggest issue here.
00:30:54.640Latin America is also losing tons of its population.
00:30:57.140So, the state takes the time and the expense to educate these people during the period when they're net parasitic on society, their young age.
00:31:05.960And then they move to the United States when they become producers and, you know, never move back.
00:31:11.860At the same time, these countries, many of them have a lower fertility rate than the United States.
00:31:16.300I need to run the math on this, but I think right now about half of Latin America has a fertility rate that's lower than the United States.
00:31:22.400And it will soon, within at least the next 10 years.
00:31:25.080With this being the case, the fact that they are also losing population is going to drain them so quickly from an economic perspective.
00:31:36.740So, when you really take these different factors into play, you realize that the demographic future of the Western world is looking better than a lot of these other regions of the world.
00:31:51.980We do receive, even though we have a lot of disaffected young people, they have better conditions and better circumstances for a good future than a lot of these other areas.
00:32:06.020Even though these other areas might be growing and might be on the rise, I don't think that's going to be long-lasting.
00:32:11.400Well, I think we also need to consider the effects of immigration that is majority one gender from hard conservative cultures, because not a lot of progressive women are going to be interested in marrying into a strict Muslim household, for example.
00:32:24.700Even though they signal that they would be, like, the moment they realize what's really up and they're like, oh, this is actually, like, conservative and not, like, play conservative.
00:32:33.680I think that they would say no to that.
00:32:35.980I'm also interested in the data you had on the collapsing fertility rates in second-generation immigrants.
00:32:42.060So, a lot of people are concerned that immigrants are becoming minority-majority population in the Western countries.
00:32:51.640And there's a lot of data in Sweden that shows that the second generation of immigrants have a far lower birth rate than the native Swedish women do.
00:33:02.080So, this is not showing in the regular TFR numbers.
00:33:06.200So, it's relative numbers compared to Swedish women.
00:34:56.840And this is what I'm going to go to a Swedish media studio tomorrow to talk about this and give people a white pill in the right wing.
00:35:05.040That if immigration were to stop to Sweden right now, and you just go forward 100 years, then the Swedish share of the population would increase, and the minority population would decrease as a proportion.
00:35:38.540But what I'm saying is this must be unique to Sweden, because I've seen other charts that show immigrants having higher birth rates, at least within generation one of the native population.
00:35:47.900So, generation one in Sweden shows higher fertility rates among immigrants.
00:35:51.760And that's why people get the conception that they are going to become a majority, because they only look at the first generations of fertility rates, which is easily available.
00:36:01.280That's, you just look at who's foreign born, just look at their TFR, and then you just run a dissimulation on that, and then you make the conclusion, oh, they're becoming a majority in like a few generations from now.
00:36:14.380You have data on the second generation, those who grew up in Sweden with immigrant-born parents, and they don't have the same number of kids.
00:36:23.760So, in Norway, they had this interesting data that showed that immigrants have the same TFR after about 10 or 15 years of living in Norway.
00:36:34.160And in Denmark, they have a bit lower, even first-generation immigrants have a bit lower TFR than the native Danish women.
00:36:41.800So, my read of this would be that these groups maintain their culture for Gen 1, and because they're from a different cultural background, they're going to have more kids.
00:36:50.740But after Gen 1, they are much more susceptible to the urban monoculture because they haven't been as exposed to it.
00:36:56.660They haven't been forced for generations to send their kids to school systems meant to brainwash them.
00:37:01.460And so, they actually get deconverted at a higher rate than kids from local moderately conservative cultures, would be my guess.
00:37:08.680So, there's another valuable piece of data that you have to take into consideration, is that most immigration concentrate in the cities.
00:37:16.580And we know that cities, on average, have a lower number of children than the countryside.
00:37:24.440So, when you say that, okay, the immigrants have a higher number of kids, then that would suggest that the cities should have higher birth rates than the countryside.
00:37:38.740So, if the first-generation immigrants are having more kids, then what explains this massive, significant lower number of kids that are born in the cities?
00:37:50.540And it's the second generation that is collapsing.
00:37:54.300So, this means that, you know, it's not a permanent solution to have immigrants replace the native-born, the locals.
00:38:04.980Well, and one thing I'd point out here is this situation is actually worse than this in a way, which is to say that the immigrants whose fertility rate is collapsing are the ones that acculturate.
00:38:15.700And the ones who do not acculturate are the ones who keep a high fertility rate.
00:38:19.540Yes. So, if you just look at those numbers, the European countries that are most similar to Sweden have a similar number of kids.
00:38:28.420And when you go further and further away from Sweden, it tends to get lower and lower.
00:38:35.460And that's when you get, you know, the least, the most incompatible culture is from Horn of Africa, for example, or Afghanistan, et cetera.
00:38:43.360Well, I mean, I think what we're seeing here is which immigrant populations are most likely to actually replace or, and that replaces the wrong word here, but I mean.
00:38:56.120End up becoming a permanent, like, like the actual fear that people have, which is a different cultural group is going to have a higher fertility rate than us that we are importing.
00:39:05.420Really, the only one that I see that from a European perspective people would actually be super afraid of would be Turkey, and who has a huge Turkish immigrant population is Germany.
00:39:30.420So, it's not all just doom and gloom about the future of the West.
00:39:36.900The incels in the West have a better chance than incels in the rest of the world by a long shot.
00:39:42.360In a sense, they're shaping the future because they're the most likely also to pioneer a new post-globalization intergenerational culture that works because they've been the first to encounter the fact that this current urban monoculture is deadly.
00:39:59.360I'd also note what's really interesting about this to me is the groups that are intergenerational, you know, when they get to generation two, maintaining a high fertility rate.
00:40:08.160If you're looking at Arab, not Arab, Arab's the wrong word here with Persians, but hey, being called Arab.
00:40:13.320I'd say, like, Middle Eastern countries, it's the countries that are actually the most urban monoculture-y in their vibe, and the ones that are most radically different actually seem to be able to preserve their culture the least well.
00:40:27.540You know, with, like, Iran having a terrible fertility rate and Turkey having a fairly good fertility rate, my guess is what's causing this is just exposure to the urban monoculture before this.
00:40:38.160Like, how radically different was this for them?
00:40:40.640You've got to keep in mind that the Middle East has had the most radical transformation in the last century.
00:40:48.660So the Middle East has had a population of about 42 million in the year 1917, and in the year 2017, 100 years later, they had about 420 million.
00:41:00.000So their population increased by 1,000% in 100 years.
00:41:42.780Elon pointed this out, and I think he made really good argument on this, which he's like, if you look at the decreasing cost of desalination and you project it going forwards, it's actually been accelerating at a super fast pace.
00:41:55.740However, what I think Elon's getting wrong here is having desalination plants in these countries is going to require a sustained global economy.
00:42:06.160And if that begins to falter with the collapse of inevitable demographic collapse of Europe, then I don't think that I would expect these countries to maintain access to desalination plants, which will lead to massive outward immigration waves.
00:42:21.820To give some context, I mentioned to the Collins that I believe that a large portion of the world population is going to run out of water in a couple of decades.
00:42:33.960And that is going to cause huge waves of immigration, probably to the West and other areas that are more sustainable.
00:42:43.400And that's largely going to come from the Middle East and North Africa that relies on aquifers and desalination plants to get their water.
00:43:18.040And the biggest city in Peru, Lima, which is like a mega city.
00:43:22.160It's the same way that like Seoul is like a third or two-thirds of South Korea's population.
00:43:26.740It's just like a huge chunk of the country's population.
00:43:28.740I can't remember, but it's more than three.
00:43:30.360Is completely dependent on a water supply in the mountains, which is going to be gone in the next, I think, what, 15 years or something or 20 years?
00:45:18.680And, you know, when you look at what countries export the most food, it's all these European countries.
00:45:28.460You know, they're not the top producers of food, but it would come to export, the exporting market.
00:45:34.640That's when all the European countries reach to the top, like Australia, USA, Russia, Argentina, France.
00:45:42.320And if those countries were to suddenly have a food crisis, they're going to prioritize their own citizens.
00:45:48.700If they have an economic decline, they're going to prioritize the needs and the safety of their own citizens and have to sacrifice their export markets.
00:45:58.280So it's in the best interest for people living in the third world that the West is doing okay.
00:46:06.340There is no, like we have such an interconnected world that there is no local or national collapse.
00:46:15.620Like if one country goes, it creates a chain reaction that affects everyone else.
00:46:19.780When the U.S. economy sneezes, the other, the rest of the world gets a cold.
00:46:25.000And I think it's not just the U.S., but like smaller countries can have that chain reaction effect as well.
00:46:31.180Just to make a very fast summary, there is a huge amount of marriage migration going on into the West, and it's causing the migration into the Western countries to be fairly gender balanced, more so than people believe.
00:46:48.800That's coming from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America for the most part.
00:46:53.280And that's driven by, you know, four factors, gender segregated economy, political divide between men and women.
00:47:01.320It's caused by a natural male surplus being born all the time and no wars to kill them off.
00:47:07.260And it's also caused by just women preferring to date the same men, a small group of men, rather than settle for an average guy.
00:47:17.860So these urban women, they, instead of causing mass male migration, they resort to polygamy.