Repopulating the Old World
The immigration backlash portends serious consequences for the long-term well-being of Europe itself. The sad truth is that without a massive increase in non-EU immigration in the next several decades, Europe is likely to wither and die—both figuratively and literally.
According to the European Commission, total EU population is expected to peak around 2022. In just the next fifteen years alone, the population over the age of sixty-five in Europe will increase by 22 percent. The population over the age of eighty will grow even faster. The number of very old people will rise by 50 percent, to more than twenty million. Europeans between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four will grow by 20 percent, and in France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Ireland the number of citizens between the age of fifty-five and sixty-four will grow by more than 40 percent. Currently, elderly people make up 16 percent of the total EU population, but by 2010 they will represent 27 percent of the entire population.
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The demographics become even more dire as we head further into the century. By 2050, the population of older persons will increase to 35 percent. There will be 2.4 old people for every child, and one-third of the entire population of Europe will be over sixty years old.
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The result is that the median age in Europe, which is now 37.7 years, will be 52.3 years in 2050. By contrast, in the U.S. the median age in 2050 will have risen only slightly, to 35.4 years.
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Europe’s overall population is expected to fall by a startling 13 percent between 2000 and 2050.
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Some individual countries fare even worse. Italy is projected to lose one-fifth of its total population by 2050.
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(Italy already has the world’s oldest population. Twenty-five percent of its citizens are over sixty years old.) Spain’s current population of 39.9 million is expected to drop to 31.3 million by 2050.
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At the heart of the problem is the continent’s frighteningly low fertility rate. Europe has the lowest fertility rate of any region of the world. In Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Greece, the fertility rate has dropped to 1.4 percent or lower, according to the World Health Organization. In Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Latvia, and the Ukraine, the fertility rate is even lower, at 1.1 percent.
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Historical comparisons tell the story. Among women born in West Germany in 1950, 14.9 percent were childless. Of the women born in West Germany in 1965, however, 31.2 percent were childless.
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The European Commission warns that “after centuries of continuous expansion the end of European population growth is now in sight.”
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Financial Times
columnist Martin Wolf put it more bluntly, saying that “Europe is becoming a vast old people’s home.”
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The only saving grace in all of these dismal statistics is the fact that when the EU enlarges from twenty-five to an expected twenty-eight countries, its total population will be upward of 550 million people. The U.S., which has a higher fertility rate, still won’t reach 550 million citizens until at least 2050.
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Adding more countries with additional people won’t solve the problem of an aging population. Governments are worried. They have embarked on a number of programs to encourage more births. They have provided handsome tax breaks for parents, paid maternity leave, free child care, a reduction in utility rates for large families, and financial assistance for young parents to purchase homes. Still, these policy initiatives, to date, have had little or no effect.
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There are a lot of reasons why fertility rates continue to drop. Europeans stay in school longer and marry later. Women with careers are deferring decisions about having children. Many couples require both partners to work to maintain the standard of living they enjoyed when they were growing up. Contraception, abortion, and divorce have also played a role in keeping down the number of births. Moreover, many of the younger generation prefer to be less tied to parental obligations and more free to enjoy their lives.
An aging population is likely to result in Europe losing its competitive edge in the world economy over the course of the first half of the twenty-first century. Already the warning signs are ominous. Across Europe, younger workers are organizing for what they call “generational justice.”
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They are feeling the burden of having to finance retirement benefits for an aging older population. Recently, thirty thousand young people took to the streets in Paris to protest what they regard as the overly generous pension benefits enjoyed by their parents’ generation.
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By 2006, more people will be retiring from the French workforce than will be entering it. With fewer working people left to provide tax revenue to finance retirement benefits, the French government, like other European nations, is suggesting radical changes in its pension program. Under newly proposed legislation, workers would be required to work for forty years rather than the current 37.5 years to secure full benefits.
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The unions have vigorously fought the reforms and have staged several nationwide one-day work stoppages.
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Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin vows, however, to continue to push for pension reforms, saying that “this is my duty to future generations.”
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In Germany, entitlements for retirees already account for 15 percent of the nation’s GDP and by 2040 are expected to be as high as 26 percent of the GDP.
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In Austria, the government has cut pension benefits by 10 percent and is gradually raising the retirement age from sixty to sixty-five.
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Fewer younger workers paying for the retirement of an increasing number of older workers—many of whom retire at age fifty-five and live on pensions for more years than they worked—is clearly untenable. Economists warn that the drag on the European economy from having to support more and more retirees is likely to be catastrophic. The European Commission estimates that the EU share of world gross product could plunge from its current 30 percent to less than 10 percent, making Europe a second-tier economic region by the second half of the twenty-first century.
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Any way you cut it, Europe’s aging population is going to prove to be an increasing burden on the European economy.
The demographic reality places Europe in the throes of a dilemma. The only way out, short of a miraculous rise in fertility—which is highly unlikely—is to open the floodgates to millions of new immigrants. In an article on the subject of Europe’s changing demographics that appeared in
Science Magazine
in 2003, the authors, Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O’Neill, and Sergei Scherbov, write that “there is a fear that just as the world is entering its most competitive stage ever, Europe will be less competitive vis-à-vis the United States and the Asian economies, which are much younger and are benefiting from what you might call a demographic window of opportunity.”
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The researchers conclude that Europe would have to take in more than a million immigrants a year to be equivalent to European women having, on average, one more child.
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Germany alone would have to welcome 500,000 young immigrants every year for the next thirty years, or double its birthrate, to avoid a steep demographic decline from its current eighty-three million people to fewer than seventy million people, and to reverse the aging of its population, which is expected to rise from a current average age of forty-one to forty-nine by 2050.
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The question of immigration puts the European Dream to the ultimate test. While it’s relatively easy to talk about encouraging diversity and promoting inclusivity, it’s rather more difficult to open one’s door to outsiders with whom native-born would have to share their own space and fortunes.
Europeans find themselves, to some extent, caught between a rock and a hard place. Without a massive influx of immigration over the next several decades, Europeans will age and the European project will die. On the other hand, a flood of immigration—and that’s what would be required for the European economy to hold its own on the world stage—threatens to overwhelm already strained government-welfare budgets and people’s sense of their own cultural identity.
Unlike America, where accommodating waves of immigrants was relatively easy because of the availability of cheap and free land, in Europe every nook and cranny has long since been filled by different cultural groups. There are few empty spaces to absorb newcomers. Most of the new immigrants stream into already tightly congested urban and suburban areas, where they jostle with other immigrant groups and native populations for a place to live their lives.
It’s difficult to imagine fifty million immigrants coming into Europe between now and 2050.
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Even these numbers, says the European Commission, would make only a marginal difference in the old-age dependency ratio in 2050.
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According to the commission, “Immigration can contribute to filling certain specific gaps in the European labour market, but it can in no way stop or reverse the process of significant population ageing in Europe.”
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To make a real difference, robust immigration would have to be combined with a dramatic increase in fertility. That means bringing the number of births back up to 2.1 percent, the level at which Europe would be able to exactly reproduce its population.
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The strangest aspect of what’s unfolding in Europe is the seeming disconnect between an aging population and a young dream. In the past, civilizations flushed with the vitality and dynamism of youth were the ones that created powerful new dreams to guide them into the future. The French and American revolutions were made by young men and women. It was Thomas Paine, the great revolutionary leader, who fought in both the American and French revolutions, who said, “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it.”
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The new European Dream is of a far different sort. It does not share the passion of the early American Dream, with its vision of a young chosen people destined for greatness. It is less evangelical and more patient. Its goal is harmony, not hegemony. It speaks to a future world where people can live in peace with one another, enjoy a quality of life, and have the opportunity to fulfill a more private dream of personal transformation. In short, it is not the exuberance of youth but is rather the wisdom of age that propels the European Dream.
Dreams are always about expectations for the future. Immigrants to America were willing to sacrifice to make a better world for their children. Their hopes were enshrined in the birthrate. Having children represented a kind of litmus test of their faith in the future. Can there really be a European Dream, then, without a heartfelt commitment to reproducing the population who will be its beneficiaries?
Increasing the fertility rate and making room for new immigrants requires sacrifice. The question, then, is this: In a post-modern world where quality of life and personal transformation in the here and now often take precedence over sacrifices that will benefit others in the far-off future, how likely are Europeans to compromise their present options on behalf of creating opportunities for others not yet here? I would suggest that the success or failure of the emergent European Dream hinges, to a great extent, on how the current generation of Europeans address the issues of fertility and immigration. What good is a dream if there is no one left in the future to benefit from its promise? For the European Dream to live on and be fulfilled, Europeans will need to address the two most critical challenges before them: reproducing their numbers in a sustainable fashion and welcoming new strangers into their midst.
Cultural Diasporas and Multi-Allegiances
There is a fundamental difference in the way immigration manifests itself in Europe compared to what we have traditionally experienced here in the U.S. In America, immigrants quickly assimilated into the dominant culture. Many were anxious to leave their pasts behind. Their dream was to become an American. The children of immigrants were, more often than not, embarrassed by their parents’ customs and ways and did everything they could to shed their past. “Starting over” was part and parcel of the American Dream.
The immigration dynamic in Europe is of a quite different nature. Immigrants are not as anxious to assimilate. Quite the contrary. Most take their culture with them, much like gypsies have for centuries. Cultural diasporas have forced a rethinking of the very idea of immigration and, in so doing, created new challenges and opportunities in Europe and throughout the rest of the world.
Ethnographers have identified more than two thousand separate nation-peoples in the world today. Because there are only two hundred territorial nation-states recognized under international law, the vast majority of distinct peoples live as minorities in their own countries or as displaced people wandering around the world in search of a home.
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Globalization of financial flows, communications, and transportation has sped the global flow of human labor. The world is experiencing a great migratory upheaval as individuals and whole peoples pick up stakes and journey to catch up to the flow of capital. Millions of human beings are in transit each year, most moving from south to north and east to west to find new economic opportunities in more affluent lands. Whole peoples have become like the wandering Jews of the last two millennia. Many, like the ethnic Chinese, exist in tight-knit communities designed to re-create their cultures abroad. It is estimated that fifty million Chinese now live outside China.
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