The after-effects of the greatest immigration wave into Europe since World War II continue to ripple across the Continent’s political landscape. Right-wing parties in Germany and Austria made big gains in recent elections. These gains also confirm the sharp decline of support for traditional political parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and now Austria. They vividly show that few issues have more currency with European electorates today than their governments’ inability to find a credible solution to the migrant crisis. At the same time, this is not just about the European Union struggling to come up with a viable immigration policy and falling short. For decades the continent’s demographic trends have been a ticking time bomb, raising questions about Europe’s ability to maintain economic growth, sustain its social market compact, and raise the requisite cohorts for its military.
In the long term, the reordering of European politics is arguably less important for Europe’s future than the impact that the current immigration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) will have on the continent’s already fragile demographic landscape. Europe is not just the proverbial “old” continent, with its great cultural heritage and splendor; it is literally old, with its populations older on average than anywhere else in the world. According to a recent study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, in Europe today there are on average only three people working for every retiree. Furthermore, by the middle of the century this ratio may fall to one-to-two—an unsustainable trend even if most of the continent’s developed economies were to significantly reduce their generous social benefits structures.
A more recent factor that has overturned earlier assumptions about Europe’s ability to cope with its deteriorating demographics has been the lingering repercussions of the economic crisis in Europe’s south in 2008. This region continues to lose young people, as they choose emigration over nonexistent economic prospects at home. Hence, by the middle of the century the average population age is likely to be highest in Greece and Portugal—and those populations will likely also be smaller than they are today, especially in rural areas. Still, before the MENA crisis it was generally assumed that the economically advanced countries in northern Europe, especially Germany, Switzerland, and in Scandinavia, stood a better chance of weathering the demographic crisis than Europe’s southern and southeastern regions. It was expected that the North’s industrial base and its strong educational systems would continue to increase productivity, which, in combination with the intra-E.U. immigration as well as intra-E.U. migration for longer periods of time of a relatively high-skilled labor force from central and northeastern Europe, would attenuate to an extent declining local population growth and the overall aging of society.
Intra-E.U. immigration/migration in particular has improved somewhat earlier demographic projections for Western Europe. According to the European Commission’s 2016 Annual Report on intra-E.U. labor mobility, published in May 2017, in 2015 approximately 11.4 million E.U.-28 citizens and EFTA citizens of working age were residing in an E.U. country other than their country of citizenship—an increase of 5.3 percent from 2014. For instance, despite its strong economic growth Poland has experienced in the last decade its largest outmigration wave in a century, with estimates of 2.2 to 2.7 million having moved to the “old” European Union, of which about 1.2 million are concentrated in the United Kingdom and Germany. Other new member states that have experienced high outmigration rates within the European Union are Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania.
Such intra-E.U. immigration has come with a price. Although until Brexit intra-E.U. immigration over the past decade and a half had not garnered a lot of attention amid the political class, there has been friction between internal E.U. immigrants and their host populations in Northern and Western Europe. While on balance the “old” European Union has benefited both from the low-cost labor as well as high-skill level of many well educated young people coming from the “new” European Union, resentment among a number of host communities has grown as well.
Most importantly, however, with the exception of the Roma community, the overall integration of intra-E.U. immigrants has been relatively straightforward and, on balance, successful. In short, one could reasonably expect intra-E.U. immigration to attenuate somewhat the “aging out” process underway in northern and western Europe, albeit with potential long-term negative consequences for the “donor” countries unless they themselves began to experience significantly higher birth rates. But intra-E.U. immigration will not be a panacea, as the demographic trends Europe is facing are a function of composite, long-term changes reflecting the Continent’s shifting family structures, individual choices, increased longevity, and an increasingly postmodern culture, especially in the north and west.
Since 2015 this complex and tenuous demographic picture in Europe has been dramatically impacted by MENA immigration. Supporters of a continued open-door MENA immigration policy have argued that this massive influx of young people—roughly seventy percent of whom are young males—will have in the long-term a much-needed salutary effect on Europe’s demographic balance, possibly even eventually reversing the previous age distribution pattern between the active and retired components of the labor force. However, even if one disregards the rather glaringly mechanistic simplicity of such a calculus, it is simply impossible to adequately assess at this point the extent to which MENA immigration into Europe could in fact improve long-term the overall demographic picture in countries such as Germany or Sweden. Nor is there a convincing argument to be made that simply having a lot of young people enter Europe, regardless of their education levels, language skills, and qualifications, will in and of itself address Europe’s demographic woes. And even if this were the case, it remains unclear whether such putative benefits would offset the ancillary economic and social costs associated with such a massive influx of people from non-European cultures.
Sweeping projections about the relative benefits of the current immigration wave should be approached with caution. The receiving countries, primarily Germany, have yet to come to terms with the overall costs of educating, integrating and acculturating the new arrivals, as well as the attendant friction and not-insubstantial public resentment in communities receiving them. On balance, it is reasonable to assume that the economic, political, and social costs accrued by MENA immigrant-receiving states will be significantly higher than the comparable costs for intra-E.U. immigrants. What is missing from the debate over Europe’s deteriorating demographics is a genuine quest for alternatives to massive immigration. There are other options available to developed democracies, especially policies that encourage and support larger families. Also, rapid digitization of services and the robotizing of manufacturing, to name but a few options, though not in and of themselves a panacea, can attenuate the problem.
It is impossible to gauge with precision at this point how the current wave of MENA immigration will ultimately transform European societies, but there can be no doubt that it will have a lasting impact both in terms of the continent’s politics and culture. But judging at least by the politics already attendant to it, the endgame scenario may result in the deepening of political cleavages and divisions within receiving societies, especially if new arrivals repeat the pattern of establishing poorly integrated “suspended communities” as has been the case with previous waves of Muslim immigration into Europe.
In the end, it may very well be that instead of alleviating the demographic strain on aging European societies, the new entrants will require long-term support from their host states before they can become net contributors to their economies, with Germany, for instance, projecting that that up to three-quarters of its refugees will still be unemployed in five years’ time. This would mean that, instead of attenuating the demographic trends that increasingly make the current European social market model ever less sustainable, the decision to continue to accept waves of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa could in fact do very little for Europe’s negative demographics and carry with it considerable economic and social costs.
