How do you plan for serious winters in your immigration plans? What I refer to is the evident boom/bust birth cycle, where the population (particularly in the North) takes a serious hit during winter years, rebounding in summer years, due to the better availability of land and other resources. It would seem that encouraging immigration would only make this problem more acute.

The boom/bust cycle seems to be concentrated largely in the North, where the winters are more severe, and which is the only place we hear of having large-scale die offs. I wouldn’t expect the same pattern to happen in the Reach or Dorne, or at least not to any severity.

Moreover, in premodern economies where the overwhelming majority of the workforce is in food production, the tricky thing is that consumers are also producers. So yes, immigrants increase the demand on the food supply, but they also increase production.