Michael J. Miller interviews Steven W. Mosher, president of Population Research Institute and author of the book Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 2008), for the Catholic World Report:
Birth rates in Catholic Spain and Italy are down to 1.1 children per couple. We’ve done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and in Italy every young couple would have to have four children in order to stop the population decline that’s currently underway. No combination of incentives in the world could turn this thing around. So Italians have no choice but to accept large numbers of immigrants, mostly Muslims from Albania, North Africa, and the Middle East. This creates the additional problem of integrating people from very different cultural, religious, and social backgrounds into Italian society.
