>Lower birth rate means fewer bodies to feed and a smaller environmental footprint.

without placing a value judgement on the outcomes, this assertion is only true if the population decreases overall, which doesn't happen in the countries with permissive immigration policies. other countries with low birth rates and strict immigration policies have different problems, like declining property values, difficulty paying for pension/retirement obligations, shrinking gdp (even if gdp per capita is increasing), etc.

I would also love this except for the fact we live in an economic system where younger people must support older people via taxes and also where growth is necessary, not a nice-to-have.

>Lower birth rate means fewer bodies to feed and a smaller environmental footprint.

Only if you're willing to starve the elderly.

No country that I'm aware of (except maybe Norway and the Saudi's, because they have resource wealth?) fully funds future social welfare policies from present day revenue.

Consequently, future generations will always be paying for present day late life social support.

Because of this, negative population growth requires higher and higher present day tax burdens to continue paying equivalent benefits.

And population economics are not something you can paper over, because they're by definition on the order of your entire country's economic output.

Sad to see this downvoted, because it's a good point. Not so long ago, all the talk was about preventing overpopulation and reducing birth rates. China had their one-child policy, which was very heavy handed and lead to a ton of problems, including gender-based abortion (or even child murder), but nobody disagreed that a reduction of population growth was necessary. It's just that everybody in western countries felt that education and access to birth control were the better option.

Now that some countries actually have shrinking populations, everybody switched from panicking about overpopulation to panicking about having not enough working population to support too many elderly people. Immigration is the popular way out, but somehow I'd expect this shouldn't have been such a big problem in the first place. A couple of decades ago, women barely worked (paid, that is; they were probably overrepresented in unpaid elderly care).

I don't think a shrinking population should be this big a problem for a country. Sure, it probably requires some economic choices, just like everything does. But especially for densely populated countries dealing with housing shortages, a lower birth rate shouldn't have to be a bad thing.