The Blog

2021-

2021-06-14 d
JUST SAY NO TO 3rd WORLD IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES AND ASYLUM-SEEKERS

(THEY WILL IMPOVERISH THE WELFARE STATE)

Costly Immigration

Many Western countries began immigration policies without feeling any need to monitor the long-term results. Indeed, many considered that immigration was an expedient response to labour shortages, and that the labourers, such as Turkish guest-workers in Germany, would probably eventually want to return home with their earnings at retirement. The United Kingdom seems to have begun its largest and most transformative policy in a typical fit of absent-mindedness. Workers were needed by London Underground, and that influx from the Caribbean began a de facto immigration policy, to which permissive legislation was added later, giving rights to all Commonwealth countries. In some sense it seemed a temporary expedient, and nothing more. Travel was by steamer, things happened slowly, and immigration proceeded steadily.

Western governments have rarely carried out large scale and detailed analyses of the benefits and costs of immigration with country-of-origin comparisons. Even now, it is hard to obtain good quality data on immigrants from different countries. For some host countries, even carrying out such analyses was deemed unseemly: immigration was seen as a fundamentally good policy, which should not be questioned. France was an example of a country which deliberately did not study such matters, because every citizen was a citizen, and comparisons are odious in the eyes of the Republic. As a result, French citizens are free to imagine the worst.

However, there are many general studies of immigrants’ contributions to the labour force, usually concluding that young immigrants are net contributors. Only studies which do the accounts over the entire lifetime (i.e. from the moment of birth or immigration to the moment of death or repatriation) give a full picture, in that young people become old, and require more services later in life. Many studies are often restricted to those coming specifically to work in the host country, and don’t include students and asylum seekers.
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In contrast to these generally positive claims, albeit they admit some shortcomings, it is a welcome surprise to find that researchers in one country have been able to gather extensive official data from Statistics Netherlands which allows costs and benefits to be studied carefully in the long term, with results tabulated according to reasons for immigration, and by country of origin.
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“The Borderless Welfare State” Jan van de Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog and Gerrit Kreffer, 2021, Amsterdam School of Economics.

http://www.demo-demo.nl/files/Grenzeloze_Verzorgingsstaat.pdf
(English abstract begins on page 19)

The authors stick closely to the economics of immigration, and report their findings in financial terms, without going into any deeper causes.
[...]

The net costs of immigration to the government are considerable, and projections show they will consume a steadily increasing portion of the annual government budget. These costs are mainly due to redistribution through the welfare state. Continuation of the current level of immigration and current arrangements of the welfare state increases pressure on public finances. Downsizing the welfare state and/or curtailment of immigration will then be inevitable.

Immigration does not appear to be a solution to the ageing population either. In essence, ageing is mainly dejuvenation due to a low fertility rate. The only structural solution for that is an increase in the average number of children per woman in the Netherlands to approximately 2.1.
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As this report demonstrates, educational attainment of the first generation, and school success of children of the first and second generation are quintessential for positive outcomes.
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A more structural approach is to monitor the costs of current immigration flows and to keep an account of the outstanding claims that immigrants have on the treasury. This brings us to the value of periodic surveys of net contributions. The Dutch government has not published data on net contributions to public finances of migrants since 2003. We can only guess the reasons for this. Hopefully, this research will make it clear that this information is necessary for the foundation of policies and insight into future government spending.
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Immigrants that make on average a significantly negative contribution to Dutch public finances are mainly those who exercise the right to asylum, especially if they come from Africa and the Middle East. The latest UN population forecast shows that the total population in these areas will increase from 1.6 billion to 4.7 billion by the end of this century. It is not implausible that the migration potential will at least keep pace. Migration pressure, in particular on the welfare states in North-Western Europe, will therefore increase to an unprecedented degree. This raises the question of whether maintaining the open-ended arrangement enshrined in the existing legal framework is a realistic option under these circumstances.

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