Policymakers and analysts across the West believe that immigration is the solution to the problem of low fertility. If natives won’t produce enough of the next generation, the difference will simply have to be imported. This wisdom bursts forth every time immigration restriction rears its head. Low-fertility countries, it is said, require large levels of immigration to stave off population decline, rapid aging, and economic decrepitude.
But the recent experience of Czechia casts doubt on this common sense. Immigration, particularly at levels large enough to make a demographic difference, is not a solution to demographic decline but instead its accelerant.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Czechia experienced a typical post-Communist demographic crisis. Every year from 1995 to 2002 the country’s population shrank. Between 1994 and 2005 deaths outnumbered births as the country’s total fertility rate—a projection of the number of children the average woman alive today will have over her lifetime—collapsed by 40 percent. Czechia’s fertility had always been above or near replacement in Communist times. Under democratic capitalism, however, it fell to levels that demographers call “lowest low” (under 1.3) for 11 years.
Then a remarkable demographic revival took place. Czechia’s fertility emerged from lowest-low territory in 2006 and by 2021 had increased to 1.83, a rebound among the largest ever recorded. Not even Covid could stop it. In 2021 the country’s fertility rate was higher than that of France, Europe’s traditional fertility leader. After 12 years of natural population decrease following the end of communism, Czechia experienced more births than deaths in 11 of the next 13 years. The national media dubbed it a Czech baby boom. Observers credited the turnaround to an overhaul of family policy in the early 2000s. Parents received an increased state allowance, expanded the child tax credit, more flexible system of parental leave, and expanded state support for IVF treatments. The country became a model of success.
“In just three years both births and fertility fell 25 percent.”
Then the baby boom collapsed. In 2022, the total number of births fell 9 percent, followed by a 10 percent fall in 2023 and another 7.5 percent decline in 2024. In just three years both births and fertility fell 25 percent, a collapse as large and rapid as the one experienced after the end of Communism. Czechia’s total fertility rate last year was just 1.37, an almost total reversal of the country’s fertility recovery. Natural population decline returned and in 2024 reached its highest annual level since World War II.
Unlike the fertility crash in the 1990s, the current one hasn’t been caused by economic depression. In fact, Czech real GDP is up 4 percent since 2021, a respectable pace for Central Europe. It has instead been caused by mass immigration.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to a historic immigration surge throughout Central Europe, but nowhere was it as dramatic as in Czechia. According to the Czech Statistical Office, 350,000 immigrants entered the country in the first year of the war, a figure equal to an astounding 3.3 percent of the country’s population at the time. According to European Union figures, the country granted nearly 460,000 people temporary protection in 2022, equal to an even more remarkable 4.4 percent of national population. Net migration remained at high levels in 2023. As of March 2025, Czechia had the largest number of Ukrainian refugees as a percentage of population of any country in the EU, more than 20 percent higher than second place Poland.
Of course, nearly every country in the European Union today has a declining fertility rate. It would be wrong to conclude that all of Czechia’s fertility crash is due solely to mass immigration. Yet no country has had a larger absolute decline in fertility since 2021 than Czechia (and only Estonia has a larger relative decline), and none has experienced a fertility reversal as abrupt as Czechia’s. Even as net immigration numbers have come off the boil of 2022, they remain two-to-three times higher than their pre-2022 levels. Fertility declines show no sign of stopping.
The causal connection between mass immigration and falling native fertility is somewhat mysterious. A common hypothesis points toward a housing effect. Some housing price increases have negative fertility effects, and a number of studies from the United States show that immigrant inflows drive up housing prices in the short-run. Research on the 1980 Mariel Boatlift showed that a 7 percent increase in the Miami labor force in one year caused an 8-11 percent real increase in rents that in turn caused a three-year fertility slump as steep as 14 percent among the city’s renters. At the same time, Miami homeowners showed no fertility decline, and other research from the United States and Canada has shown that an increase in housing wealth among homeowners can actually increase fertility among this group. Czech real estate prices certainly rose in 2022, but no more steeply than in the period before the refugee influx, and they actually declined in 2023. Moreover Czechia has a homeownership level well above the EU average, which should temper rather than exacerbate fertility decline.
Another hypothesis emphasizes household income. An immigrant surge can drive down wages, especially at the lower end of the wage scale, making natives poorer and thus decreasing their fertility. Yet the unemployment rate for Czechs aged 25-54 (the mean age of Czech women at childbirth is now 30.4) is the lowest in the European Union and has even fallen slightly since 2021.
Materialist hypotheses are not the only ones we can entertain. Studies have shown significant fertility effects from all manner of ephemeral cultural and political events, whether elections or sporting matches or papal visits. Why wouldn’t a mass immigration event provoke a fertility reaction far greater than an electoral or sporting defeat?
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, support for the Czech right-populist party ANO has been on the rise, reaching an all-time high of 35 percent earlier this year. ANO’s popularity has begun to flag in recent months only due to the challenge from Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), a party even farther out on the populist right. Both ANO and SPD hold restrictionist positions and win the support of right-wing populist voters motivated by feelings of cultural dispossession and powerlessness, a preference for homogeneity over heterogeneity, and fears over national decline. ANO leader and former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš explicitly has connected mass immigration, native fertility decline, and national despair, saying in 2021, “They know that mass, unchecked illegal migration is not the solution. Quite the contrary. The only truly sustainable solution against Europe's extinction is to increase the birth rate of our own, indigenous population.”
The connection between cultural despair and fertility decline is not necessarily direct, however. Young Czechs of child-bearing age are not right-wing populist voters. Their parents and grandparents are. Those who despair over the demographic future of the nation turn out to be the ones least able to do anything about it. Their worries drive support for right-wing populism, which in turn provokes a left-wing backlash from the young that trends toward anti-natalism. This is especially true among young women, precisely the demographic that needs to buy into the populist fertility project for it to succeed.
In a period of low and declining fertility, many conclude that mass immigration is the only solution to population decline, societal aging, and welfare-state collapse. But simply on demographic grounds, mass immigration may be a cure worse than the disease. Rather than resign themselves to importing the next generation, policy-makers should ask why natives have lost so much faith in the future.