An opinion piece by Berliner Zeitung author Thomas Fasbender addresses the massive demographic shifts taking place in Germany, while referring to how ethnic Germans will become a minority in the near future. His piece certainly explores some areas that are extremely sensitive among the German mainstream, all while he takes efforts to lambast terms like “Great Replacement,” which he claims only stir up hatred.
Fasbender does not seem like a bad person or writer by any means, but his piece, entitled “Demographics in Germany: Multiculturalism is coming faster than expected,” has some glaring problems. For one, there is nothing really all that novel about it besides the fact that it was published in a mainstream German outlet. The political right has been warning about the demographic transformation for years. Thilo Sarrazin, who originally hailed from the political left SPD, famously wrote an entire book about it. Just last year, Sarrazin basically said that the situation was even worse than he predicted.
The second not-so-novel aspect of Fasbender’s piece is his fatalistic outlook regarding the whole issue, which is more or less commonplace among Western society and its political class. His repeated adage can be summed up as: nothing can change or reverse this trend. It is simply the course of nature. Anyone who stands in the way is a fool and even a loser.
In other words, it has nothing to do with European or German policy. It is a view that seems almost designed to absolve all the policy choices that were already made along the way.
Describing the demographic transformation
First, it is worth exploring Fasbender’s description of the problem, and he does indeed recognize it as a huge problem with no easy solutions. The projections are very stark for a society that has been more or less homogeneous for many centuries.
“Migration does something with society. It brings experiences of loss, both for the immigrants and for the people in the host country. Familiarity is lost there, especially in a society that has been largely ethnically homogeneous for a long time, such as Germany. The shift to heterogeneity causes collective stress.
And this change is happening rapidly. Bio-German homogeneity still exists only at election campaign events of the Greens and the AfD, or at readings by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Beyond such shelters, society throws bubbles. A fermentation process is underway that promises upheaval.
This can be supported quantitatively. By the middle of the century, between 17 and 20 million Germans without a migration background would die; almost the entire Boomer generation would leave. At the same time, Germans without a migration background (birth rate 1.3) would give birth to only six to seven million children, and even fewer if the birth rate continued to decline. This reduced the proportion of native Germans in the population by at least ten million.
Among the population with a migrant background, the higher proportion of women of childbearing age means that the number of births by 2050 will also be around seven million. Here too, a birth rate of 1.3 is assumed – which contradicts reality, as it averages just over 1.8 for mothers with a migration background. If the effects of the higher birth rate and continued immigration of up to 400,000 people annually are added together, the number of births with a migration background will reach up to nine million by 2050.
Even today, 40 or more percent of newborns in Germany have a migration background; some sources speak of half. A tie in births –with and without a migration background– will be achieved after 2030 at the latest.”
The piece goes on without really saying anything that could be classified as particularly interesting. He does start lobbing shots at the right for its “hatred” and the left for its naivety.
“This description is about changes that are inevitable. The right-wingers who are now calling for ‘remigration’ have no idea what is feasible. Your jump will fail at the start. And for the leftists who color their Bullerbü, it will fall like scales from their eyes when the street burns like in France,” he writes
The author concludes that ideas of “remigration” promoted by the right will never happen. Instead, Germany may just likely fall into civil war.
As a result, the question should be asked as to why Fasbender offers zero solutions. He essentially claims that Germany should not be surprised if it sees French-style riots and car burnings in the future, while warning of looming civil war. He literally ends his piece writing this: “Looking to France, where you might be ten years ahead of the Germans on their way to civil war, should give you pause.”
If Fasbender’s belief is truly that civil war is a realistic scenario for Germany in the coming years, while demonizing the right for efforts to fight back against this scenario, then Fasbender comes off as naive as the leftists he mocks. There is not even an effort to call for an immigration moratorium or even a less chaotic immigration system. Unfortunately, there are really no solutions offered by Fasbender at all, and that appears to be exactly how he wants you to walk away from his piece.
Solutions abound
Despite what Fasbender claims, there are solutions that can at least be considered. That is why it is worth looking at other countries and how their policies and actions specifically have avoided these problems and reversed course on mass immigration.
Notably, remigration happens all the time in our wide, wide world. Pakistan, for instance, deported a staggering 2 million Afghans back to their country between September 2023 and January 2026. There were an estimated 3.8 million Afghans in Pakistan at the time the deportation order was announced, with Pakistani authorities believing the number to be as high as 4.4 million. Afghans accounted for 98 percent of the foreign nationals in Pakistan.
In 2013, almost a million migrants were deported from Saudi Arabia in order to boost the employment of Saudi nationals and protect national security.
The Middle East is notorious for expelling foreigners whenever it deems fit. These countries, which arguably lack the operational efficiency of a country like Germany, still manage to send home millions of people when they decide they want to.
Of course, these countries are not Germany, but it shows that there are different political systems, and these political systems can enact rather large-scale deportations. Notably, Germany cannot legally deport naturalized citizens from foreign countries, but it can, in theory, stop further non-EU immigration. It can also deport many of the individuals who are not legally in the country, for starters.
Not everyone decided on inviting civil war conditions
It is important to note that this was all decided on, and just as it was decided that millions of migrants would come, it can also be decided that efforts must be made to reverse this trend. Countries like Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and even Hungary took a different path.
The existence of nations that have chosen, quite deliberately and with considerable success, to maintain strict control over immigration and preserve their demographic character presents a direct challenge to the fatalist framing that runs through much of Western demographic commentary, including this Berliner Zeitung piece. The inexorable tide of more immigrants and demographic change turns out to be a policy choice.
Japan is the example Fasbender himself concedes, almost dismissively, as an exception — referring to only the “remote islands” of Japan where prevention is possible. But this framing understates both the deliberateness and the sophistication of Japanese policy. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy. It is deeply integrated into global trade, finance, and culture. Even if the country has embraced very limited migration, it has decided as a matter of democratic consensus, that mass immigration was not the answer to its demographic challenges.
Japan’s foreign-born population sits at roughly 3 percent. Net migration runs in the tens of thousands annually for a nation of 125 million. The government has experimented cautiously with guest worker programs to address labor shortages in specific sectors, but these are structured specifically to avoid permanent settlement. Naturalization is possible but demanding, requiring genuine cultural and linguistic integration. The result is a society that remains overwhelmingly Japanese in character, language, custom, and civic identity — by design, not by accident.
Crucially, Japan has not collapsed as a consequence. It faces real economic headwinds from an aging population, but it has addressed these through automation, robotics, productivity gains, and a dramatic increase in female workforce participation. The social fabric remains intact. Crime rates are among the lowest in the developed world. Public trust in institutions is comparatively high. The streets of Tokyo are not burning. Japan is not speaking of civil war. When the boomers die off, there may even be opportunities for the Japanese population to have more children, including with more space available for larger families in dense urban areas like Tokyo.
Other Westerners have noticed the growing difference between Japan and the rest of the West. Japan features a shared ethnicity, language, cultural reference points, and civic norms, which reduces friction in ways that are difficult to quantify but easy to observe. That might be why Western female journalists now like to write articles about Japan’s superior living situation and “respect” seen within the Japanese population.
In Welt, Christina zur Nedden writes that Japan is “the better Germany.” She notes that between Germany and Japan, both countries show that “dealing with the demographic crisis also reveals fundamental differences in thinking. Both countries are aging rapidly, but the reactions to them are contradictory – and seem like a mirror of the respective mentality. Germany relies on immigration, struggles with integration, and discusses upper limits. In Japan, however, society remains largely ethnically homogeneous and seeks the solution in technology, discipline and self-restraint: robots, artificial intelligence, social consensus instead of migration.”
Notably, she points to all the small examples that highlight the differences between the countries. “There is hardly any honking or bumping in Tokyo, for example. The 14 million inhabitants of the metropolitan area alone (38 million people live in the greater Tokyo area) would have good reason to do so. As I walk through the bustling Ginza shopping district and across the famous Shibuya intersection over the weekend, I feel safe despite the crowds – no one bumps me, no one seems to want to steal or grope me. You pay attention to each other. Even when I ride the subway during rush hour, the passengers ‘mindfully squeeze’ – I can’t describe it any other way – to make even more room for boarders.”
China also shows the way
China presents an even starker case. With 1.4 billion people, it is hardly a remote “Japanese island” insulated from global forces by geography. Yet its foreign-born population is negligible — well under one percent. Some studies have indicated that China has fewer foreigners living in it than in just one German city, Berlin.
China has never entertained the notion that mass immigration is a legitimate response to economic or demographic needs. Naturalization is extraordinarily rare, requiring decades of residence and offering no guarantee even then.
This basically comes down to a deliberate civilizational stance. The Chinese state views demographic continuity as inseparable from social stability and national sovereignty. Whether one agrees with that posture politically, its effectiveness is not in serious dispute. China is not experiencing the identity fractures, the parallel societies, or the cultural friction that characterizes contemporary France, Germany, or Sweden.
It is also worth noting, as Remix News has frequently reported, that China is pulling ahead of Europe in educational outcomes to an extreme degree. Furthermore, China is dominating Europe in various economic areas, such as automobile manufacturing, machine tools, green energy, and artificial intelligence.
There are virtually no unassimilated foreigners in China, but if 5 million showed up tomorrow, China would likely have no problem with “remigration.” It would just do whatever needs to be done to maintain social harmony. To top it off, much of the global left probably would treat it with a shrug, much the same way they have had virtually no substantive reaction to mass deportations in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
South Korea and Taiwan further dispel the notion that mass migration is inevitable
South Korea and Taiwan, both vibrant democracies deeply embedded in the global economy, tell similar stories. South Korea’s foreign-born population is around 4 percent, dominated by ethnic Koreans from China and short-term workers. Taiwan’s is comparable. Both nations have faced labor shortages and aging populations — the same pressures used in the West to justify mass immigration — and both have chosen managed, limited, and largely temporary migration as their response.
Neither country shows signs of democratic collapse, economic failure, or social breakdown as a consequence of this choice. Both consistently rank among the world’s most innovative, educated, and stable societies.
The flaw in Fasbender’s fatalism
The deeper problem with the framing Fasbender and many Western commentators adopt is that it presents a specific policy choice — the decision to accept large-scale, permanent, culturally diverse immigration — as if it were a natural law rather than a decision made by governments, courts, and international agreements. Europe’s demographic transformation is real, but it did not happen because geography demanded it. It happened because of specific choices made over specific decades regarding asylum law, family reunification policy, labor migration, and border enforcement.
In some cases, reversing course would just be a matter of enforcing laws that are already there. There has been plenty of research done on this issue already. Taking just a few of these steps would go a long way to at least stopping the flow of migration. In fact, without even discussing a so-called “remigration” program, efforts could be made to remove migrants with serious criminal records, and those who fail to properly integrate or earn an income after years in European countries. In addition, an immigration moratorium, except for the few workers who can be argued fulfill a critical function to German security and its economy, would go a long way to reversing course.
The Asian examples demonstrate that stable, prosperous, globally connected nations can maintain demographic continuity when their governments treat it as a legitimate policy objective rather than an embarrassing atavism — something racist and hate-filled. The social harmony these countries exhibit is not incidental to their demographic stability. It is, at least in part, a product of it.
Fasbender is correct that the debate in Europe is poorly conducted at times, including from the right, especially when it veers into pure hateful narratives and slurs without context about other ethnic and religious groups. Any policies that restrict immigration and emphasize deportation should not be conducted through hate, but through a policy of preserving social cohesion, order, and harmony.
The Asian experience suggests there is a legitimate position that goes largely unexamined in Western discourse: calm, consistent, democratically mandated immigration control as a tool for preserving social cohesion and cultural similarity. This is not done out of fear or hate, but out of a considered judgment that the pace of change matters enormously for a society’s ability to absorb this change.
The tide, it turns out, can be managed. Some countries simply decided they would. Will Germany and the rest of Europe even consider this option? If the road leads to more societal strife, polarization, insecurity, and even civil war, then we can only hope so.
