It has become one of the most often repeated mantras of our late Soviet age of European—or, rather, of EU—history: “We need immigration.” A continent with too few births and too much debt is told time and again by its political class that it will survive only by importing millions of new workers from the Third World. The idea is repeated by politicians, quantified by economists, and echoed by journalists. But decades of mass migration have left Europe poorer in relative terms than it has been since, at least, the 15th century. Europeans have been fed a lie.
If mass immigration bred growth, however, then surely the last thirty years should have witnessed an economic golden age. Yet, the average annual growth of GDP declined by half, from 2.1% to barely more than 1%. France, Britain, and the Netherlands all posted record numbers of migrants this year; all three have stagnant wages, stagnant productivity, and shrinking per capita growth. Germany, Europe’s workhorse, has taken in around seven million newcomers since 2015. Its economy now finds itself in what the IMF terms a “quasi-permanent stagnation.”
The proponents of mass migration—an odd coalition of neoliberal ideologists and irrational, wishy-washy progressives—argue that migrants “fill the jobs Europeans won’t do.” This is another lie. The reality is, rather, that immigration has created low-wage economies supported by welfare. Immigrants in Spain and France are three times more likely to be poor than native-born citizens. In Sweden or Germany, immigrants make up around 50% and 40-45% of all recipients of social welfare.