Immigration crackdowns to bring slower growth and higher taxes

Anti-immigration policies are vote winners in Europe and beyond, but what few politicians peddling such policies fail to point out is that cracking down on immigration will only accelerate population decline which will in turn decelerate growth.

“The main consequences will be slower growth because the labor force will shrink, and higher tax burdens, because pension spending and the demand for health and elderly care will rise,” John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform think tank, told The Guardian.

According to Giovanni Peri, Professor of Economics and director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, anti-immigration arguments don't consider “the Achilles’ heel of the global North: its demographics.”

Photo: screenshot from US-Davis website

Writing for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Peri points out that fertility in many western countries stands at around 1.7, resulting in an ever-ageing population.

Immigrants tend to be young, or at least working age, and can contribute to growth and to the filling of the state coffers needed for pensions and elderly care, he adds.

Bolstering this point of view is an analysis carried out by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) and cited by Forbes.

“Admitting fewer immigrants results in lower economic growth because labor force growth is an important element of economic growth and immigrants play a major part in both current and future labor force growth,” it stated.

Right now, 21% of the EU population is aged 65 or over. According to Eurostat, the EU’s official statistics agency, even with immigration this percentage will rise to 32% by 2100. Without it, it will climb to 36%.

As far as general population decline is concerned, the EU will have 6% less people in it by 2100 given immigration levels as seen in the past 20 years, dropping from 447 million to 419 million.

But without immigration, that 447 million will tumble by a third to 295 million by the end of this century.

Worst hit will be Germany, France and Italy, whose leaders either are far-right or have the far-right breathing down their necks and are consequently taking harder lines on immigration in a desperate bid to keep these actors at bay.

In Germany which goes to the polls on February 23, a block on immigration as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) proposes, would mean the population contracting from 80 million to 53 million between now and 2100.

In France, where the far-right National Rally won 37% of the vote in the first round of France’s general election last summer, cut immigration and the current population will drop from 68 million to 59 million within the next 80 years.

On both sides of the Atlantic, anti-immigrant sentiment is often driven by fear of crime and a loss of jobs.

Yet, according to a study cited by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are US-born individuals who are white.

Meanwhile, Peri states in his article for the IMF that “there is little evidence that immigration displaces jobs or depresses wages in the receiving countries.”

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