LONDON – For many years we have been blinded by news about immigration. Hardly a day goes by when we are not told some provoking item – yesterday, black Africans in a small boat taking in water in a wild sea trying to reach Europe. And this past month we have been swamped by stories about the slow down of population growth and the ageing population of Europe, with often the corollary – the argument that the Europe of the future cannot survive without opening the immigration gates wide. But, as Walter Lippmann once wrote, news and truth are not the same thing.
Into this ill-informed, news-fed, maelstrom in Europe has stepped all manner of bombastic opinion making- from Jean-Marie Le Pen on the anti-immigrant right in France, who gained 17% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election last year, to the sophisticated writer Oriani Fallaci who, in Italy’s leading liberal paper, Corriere Della Sera, wrote of seeing Somali immigrants living in a tent, performing their bodily functions next to Florence Cathedral, and asked in seething prose, “why should we respect people who don’t respect us?”
Apparently, the situation is set to worsen. One forecast made by the UN’s chief of population statistics, Joseph Chamie, predicts that if the present German low birth rate continues and immigration is zero Germany’s population will fall by over half by the end of the century. And if that happens who is going to pay for the pensions of the present ageing workforce? The Financial Times answered this question in a recent editorial: “Europe must now prepare to open its doors.”
But what does that mean? Should Europe bring in 170 million immigrants by mid century if it wishes to keep its population aged 16 to 64 at today’s level (which it would have to if the German kind of arithmetic were applied across Europe)?
To worsen the mix (and the emotions) the last couple of weeks the serious press has been busy linking the pension reform movement now finally gathering speed in France, Germany and the UK with Europe’s future as an ageing power weakened economically, militarily and culturally as it lets in sufficient immigrants to cause more social and cultural turbulence but not enough to compensate for its fast declining population and concomitant economic decline.
But a trend we should know by now is not a final statement. Sweden, the mother of not only the sexual revolution but of the working mother and the government funded crèche, after years of a dramatically falling birthrate now exhibits signs of a reverse. Italy, Germany and Spain are introducing incentives that will encourage couples to have more children. In the U.K. and France the decline in population is happening rather more slowly and probably could be easily reversed with the same kind of encouraging policies that the Scandinavian governments have fashioned. Among the wealthier members of the middle-class across Europe larger families are already more popular than a generation ago, suggesting that while increased general prosperity may at first encourage a low birth rate as young couples become consumer conscious, sustainable wealth may work the other way. Besides, rising divorce rates have introduced a relatively new growing phenomenon- a still fertile woman giving birth to a second family.
The pension debate is equally misleading. Every study has shown that the simple expedient of the rising of the retiring age – but by more than the handful of years that is now being proposed in Germany and France- can knock the bottom out of a large part of this problem. In an age when people are living longer and healthier lives (a French child today has a 50% chance of reaching 100) it is quite ridiculous that people should renounce working so early in life. It is wrong headed to assume these older workers will not be able to contribute the energy and vitality of younger people. In an economy where brain power counts for more by the year there can be no question that older people often have more knowledge and thus more cleverness in a wide range of jobs. It is simply a question of mental block. We will have to invent new age categories to replace those that have tended in the past to cling tenaciously to the stages of reproductive (and sexual) life: marriage, parenthood and grandparenthood (and, shortly after, death). These old categories no longer hold good. We have much left to do whilst our grandchildren grow up.
A final point: it is something of a red herring to suggest that the U.S. with its tradition of liberal immigration and therefore a more youthful population has a better answer. A fairly recent study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimates that migrants make an annual net contribution to the economy of $10 billion- truly peanuts.
It is how the labor force – old or young – is used that is the important thing.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By JONATHAN POWERFollow this link to read about – and order – Jonathan Power’s book written for the
40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
“Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International”
