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Many tech-industry leaders have become prominent supporters of immigration reform,

They argue that if skilled workers—many of whom are educated in U.S. universities—are not permitted to work in the United States, some tech companies may be forced to move their operations offshore.

early one third of undocumented immigrants in the United States are the parents of U.S.-born children, according to the Pew Research Center.

"[The United States' undocumented immigrant] population is not growing—it's more settled,"

Increasingly, people who are coming are Central Americans fleeing violence and seeking asylum—not Mexicans seeking work—and that's a very different policy problem. But I don’t think Congress has caught up with that. The debate and the approaches still reflect the world of a decade ago."

Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential elections and many Republican strategists said that their party would need to strike a more conciliatory tone on migration following the party's loss that year.

Comprehensive immigration reform refers to proposed legislation that would change U.S. immigration laws to address demand for high-skilled and low-skilled labor, legalize most undocumented immigrants already in the country, and toughen border and interior enforcement.

Immigration Innovation Act: A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in January 2015 that would nearly double the number of visas for temporary high-skilled workers, from 65,000 to 115,000, and eliminate annual per-country limits for employment-based green cards. Start-Up Act: A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in January 2015 (three prior versions had been introduced) that proposed creating an entrepreneurs’ visa for immigrants and a STEM visa for U.S.-educated workers with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, and eliminating per-country caps on employment-based immigration visas. Secure Our Borders First Act: A Republican bill that threatens penalties against senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials whose departments fail to intercept a targeted number of crossings. The proposal would allow the Border Patrol to operate on all federal lands, provide funding for the National Guard to participate in securing the border, and authorize expanded use of surveillance drones along the border.

Obama's immigration announcement emphasized his administration's efforts to secure the U.S. border, and in FY 2014, nearly twenty thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents (PDF) operated along the southwestern border—the largest deployment in U.S. history.

That's because he doesn't want to increase any immigration, skilled or not, legal or unauthorized

put strict limits on the number of immigrants let into the country.

harder for them to claim that they have a plan for reform of their own.

allows immigration agents to pursue deportations regardless of priority and without consideration of an individual’s ties to the United States.

not grant deferred action or work permits to undocumented immigrants because their exclusion from the Affordable Care Act could encourage employers to hire undocumented immigrants rather than Americans or others who are entitled to health insurance.

with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya,

bullet train.

n 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did.

It is mostly young people who move to the cities

Bear attacks near settlements in Japan’s north are increasing as humans stop pruning back trees and maintaining their land. Wild boars have been ravaging farmland across the island of Honshu.

predicted that 896 cities, towns, and villages would be extinct by 2040. Dozens of towns will see the number of young people drop significantly, as the share of elderly people grows, he predicted. Overall, Japan’s population is expected to shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2010 to 97 million by 2050.

apanese towns are wrestling with dilemmas like how to run their governments with fewer tax dollars, and how to provide services for an increasingly needy population with fewer workers. To make this all the more challenging, governance is strained by the population decline as well: In Yamagata Prefecture, 45 percent of seats in the local assembly race in 2015 were uncontested because of a lack of candidates.

Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking

Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,

Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return.

“They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back,

Of the 500 or so teenagers who graduate high school in Minamiuonuma every year, only about 100 remain in the city after graduating. Everybody else goes off to college, and only 40 come back after graduating from college on average, the mayor, Shigeo Hayashi, told me.

the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015;

When a population is shrinking and most of that population lives in urban centers, that spells problems for rural areas like Tochikubo and Minamiuonuma, unless there is a lot of immigration.

The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money t

someone needs to be around to provide these services.

Right now, the decline of these places is happening fast, within a generation or two. If it can be a more gradual process, perhaps then basic social services can at least survive for long enough to provide for the remaining residents.

One obvious solution to reversing, or at least slowing, rural Japan’s decline would be to open up the country to immigration

Just 1.8 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13 percent of the population in the United States.

But Japan is a country whose national identity is, in some ways, based upon racial homogeneity. Proposals to significantly increase immigration have gone nowhere, and polls consistently find that two-thirds of Japanese are against large-scale immigration.

And it’s unlikely that immigrants, even if they were allowed in, would move to rural areas where there are few jobs even for the people who want to stay.

In Minamiuonuma, for instance, city leaders talk about their newly-built global IT park, where start-ups can set up offices for low rent, and a business academy for people interested in creating their own business. They built a brand-new hospital and medical college to attract doctors and nurses, and are in the process of building a series of homes for active retired people in the hope that retirees will want to relocate to the city. Like almost every other shrinking city, Minamiuonuma sends brochures to young people from the region to try to get them to come home. But still, the population continues to shrink

Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate.

Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline.

Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040

Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division

Niigata sponsors matchmaking events for its young people, and even invited a matchmaking company to come in and pair rural men with women living in cities like Tokyo. “For our division, one of the most important things is making couples,”

The fertility rate of women in Niigata has fallen from nearly four babies per woman in 1950 to 1.43 babies per woman in more recent years.

Niigata is focusing on making it easier for women to have babies and still work. The prefecture is giving certifications to companies that have good parental leave policies in the hope that doing so will motivate companies to be more flexible, but it has no real sway over what companies decide

reducing interest payments for families who borrow money to pay for their children’s education

But the prefecture hasn’t seen a significant uptick in marriages,

or in births.

When I asked them about supporting births outside of marriage, officials told me such a thing wouldn’t be acceptable in Japan. Even telling couples to get married doesn’t necessarily go over well. “We are the public sector. It’s difficult for us to say, ‘You should marry as soon as possible, you’re mature enough to have babies,’” she said.

Yubari, for instance, a town on the northern island of Hokkaido, which lost 90 percent of its population between 1960 and 2014, declared bankruptcy in 2007

Since then, it has drastically cut back on services such as public buses and snow removal, merged schools, laid off government employees, and cut funds for public parks. It relocated residents from public housing on the outskirts of town to apartments close to the city center.

In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer

people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75.

“Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”

They’re most concerned about the disappearance of a way of life—that no young people will come to the village and learn how to farm rice without machines or how to weave cloth or make sake. “It’s difficult for us to give knowledge to the younger generation,” F

"Politicians will not do anything for us. They're just interested in their own interests. They don't care about the people - especially the old people in the villages. They don't even care about the young people because the young people are abroad.

In 1989, almost nine million people lived in Bulgaria. Now, it is a little over seven million. By 2050, that number is projected to be less than 5.5 million. By the end of the century, it could be close to half what it is now.

A better yardstick to watch for on Thursday could be the number of people who live in Britain but who retain a non-British nationality.

The number of non-UK born residents gives only a partial picture of recent migration and integration trends, because it is a cumulative figure stretching back over decades.

“The prevalence of migration to the UK is therefore by no means unprecedented by European standards,”

From an economic perspective immigration brings both costs and benefits and affects different people in different ways, leaving no objective method of deciding what the ‘right number’ of migrants is. Different demographic, economic and political arguments can be marshalled in favour of either increasing or reducing immigration, and reasonable people will disagree,” it says.

The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.

The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay

Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt

In Portugal, the population has been shrinking since 2010.

Portugal’s population could drop from 10.5 million to 6.3 million by 2060.

In Italy the retired population is soaring, with the proportion of over-65s set to rise from 2.7% last year to 18.8% in 2050.

Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world: 8.2 per 1,000 population between 2008 and 2013,

On average, Britain’s population grew at a faster rate over the last decade than it has done over the last 50 years.

a direct threat to economic growth as well as pensions, healthcare and social services.

the grey vote.

“During the same time frame, expenditures on pensions rose by more than 40%. We’re moving closer to being a gerontocratic society – it’s a government of the old.”

In 2012, the regional government launched a multi-pronged initiative to address the falling fertility rate, with plans to roll out measures such as home and transport subsidies for families and radio advertisements urging women to have more children.

The region of Galicia is one of the few in Spain that has addressed the issue.

“these issues will only be solved by a miracle.”

ack of financial security that prompts many Italians to live with their parents well into their 30s. The difficulty for mothers to return to the workplace also means women must make considerable sacrifices if they decide to have children.

give low-income couples a monthly “baby bonus” of €80

The youth jobless rate hit 44.2% in June, while overall it stood at 12.3%.

By 2060 the government expects the population to plunge from 81 million to 67 million,

In order to offset this shortage, Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.

Only Scandinavia appears to be weathering the demographic storm with any success, partly thanks to generous parental leave systems, stable economies, and, in the cases of Sweden and Norway, high net immigration.

n Sweden it is possible to combine motherhood with a working life,”