Immigration Is a False Solution to Europe’s Economic Stagnation

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.

The facts speak for themselves. Between 1995 and 2024, the EU’s foreign-born population rose by almost 140%—from 26 million to over 62 million people, or more than the entire population of Italy. This is a process without parallel in European history, in particular if one considers that previous instances of mass migration, such as the great population movements of the 3rd to 6th centuries, were violent and, on the other hand, largely of other Europeans already far more Romanised than is often appreciated in modern analogies. There is, thus, no genuine point of comparison, either in the nature of the demographic transformation currently taking place or in the degree of collective and institutional passivity with which it has been accepted.

This dramatic shift hasn’t only been praised by leftists excited about the construction of new, virtuous multicultural societies. Business interests have similarly defended it, claiming that Europe’s low birth rates and ageing workforces make mass immigration crucial to retain fiscal stability and economic prosperity. 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.”

In France, unemployment among foreign-born individuals (12.5%) is more than double that of the native population (5.1%). In Sweden, over 55% of adults who were born in Iraq and Somalia do not have full-time employment. In Germany, 44% of refugees are still unemployed after five years in the country.

This is happening while the very reason for importing so much unskilled labour—Europe’s declining workforce—is being rapidly erased by technology. China, with an even steeper demographic plunge than Europe, continues to enjoy healthy economic growth while taking a very different route. Rather than opening the gates to mass migration, it has embraced mass automation. In 2024, China deployed 295,000 new factory robots—more than the rest of the world combined, or 54–57% of the global total. Its productivity per worker in manufacturing has increased by 80% over the past decade and grown by an average of 7-8% per year. In the meantime, Europe’s has barely budged. South Korea, a country with the world’s lowest fertility, has followed suit: it has the highest concentration of robots worldwide, at over 1,000 robots per 10,000 workers. Seoul has not found it necessary to import tens of millions of foreign labourers.

Europe, however, still maintains the appearance that the introduction of more people will compensate for not innovating. The old continent’s proportion of world manufacturing output has fallen from 30% in 1990 to only 15% today, while its median age has gone up from 35 to 44. Brussels is trying to fight entropy with bureaucracy.

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.

If prosperity truly meant anything to our sclerotic institutions, they would invest less in immigration policy and more in innovation. The continent that created the printing press and the jet engine should not be farming out its future to low-skill foreign labourers. Rather, its survival demands that money be invested in robotics, automation, and education—the multipliers of productivity and, therefore, the true roots of wealth. Instead, Brussels is obsessed with ‘labour mobility,’ as if shuffling more people around is a superior option to producing more value per person. It patently is not.

And this is to say nothing of the future. Even as the Fourth Industrial Revolution marches forth at full speed and nations are transformed beyond recognition, Europe is trying to shield itself from the tsunami of history by increasingly converting itself into a low added-value, obsolete, and peripheral area of the world economy. Sooner or later—and that is to say sooner rather than later—Europeans will come to realise, as late Qing China did, that civilisations can either embrace technical progress or find themselves at the mercy of those who did. When that happens, Europe will try to jump back into the train only to find itself shackled to vast, foreign-born populations that will be economically useless, unable to make a living for themselves, culturally distinct, and aggrieved. It is already difficult enough to keep social cohesion in multicultural societies when most people can find jobs. It will be immeasurably more difficult to do so when so many tens of millions of European jobs are replaced by AI and automation.

There is no trade-off to be made between nationhood, identity, security, and social cohesion and economic prosperity. By keeping wage growth low or non-existent, immigration itself is a driver of stagnation. The solution to our ills lies elsewhere: in automation, in invention, in European families with the will and resources to have children, and in the rediscovery of our own ability to construct rather than borrow the future.