Immigration has failed to produce the promised economic panacea in France and has rather resulted in a negative strain on the economy, costing the nation an estimated 3.4 per cent in GDP, a think tank has claimed.
The Observatory of Immigration and Demography (OID) argued that immigration has not only negatively impacted the social structures within France but has also come with a “budget deficit” in which taxes collected from immigrants only make up 86 per cent of what they cost the taxpayer, Le Figaro reported.
The OID think tank attributed this imbalance to the fact that just 62.4 per cent of working-age immigrants are actively employed in France, the worst performance of any EU nation except Belgium at 61.4 per cent and well below the EU average of 67.5 per cent. In contrast, native French workers have a 69.5 per cent employment rate.
This means, according to calculations from the think tank, that if immigrants had the same employment rate as the native born population, the French GDP would be 3.4 per cent higher than it currently stands and taxable income would be one and a half points higher.
Observatory of Immigration and Demography director Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti said: “Immigration maintains a vicious circle which harms employment and the French economy: it aggravates the structural problems of employment in France, degrades public accounts and indirectly penalizes exposed sectors of the economy.”
Pouvreau-Monti said that while public discussion of immigration is often centred around specific sectors which have frequent short-term labour shortages, such as in the hotel and restaurant, and construction industries.
However, the OID founder said that the “short-term vision prevents us from thinking about the best way to make these professions more attractive for people looking for work.” Meanwhile, such immigration is often focused on low-skilled labour rather than on high-skilled workers that drive innovation.
Furthermore, the loss of growth and the cost to the taxpayer forces the government to impose additional taxes on business, which in turn further strains the entire economy.
“In other words, encouraging immigration to avoid shortages in certain sectors in tension amounts to sacrificing the growth of our strategic sectors for the benefit of only a few corporate interests,” Pouvreau-Monti said.
One of the key reasons the OID attributed to the low employment rate of migrants in France was that it largely focussed on family reunification, also known as chain migration, more than any other country in Europe. Pouvreau-Monti said that “finding work is more difficult for an immigrant when professional integration is not at the root of the decision to emigrate to France.”
Perhaps more concerningly, the relative economic inactivity continued among the children of migrants, according to analysis by the tink tank of data from the OECD.
“The share of young people born in France to immigrant parents who were neither in employment, education nor training was 24 per cent for the years 2020-2021. This was the second highest rate in Europe and the Western world, only behind Belgium,” the OID found.
This phenomenon, the Observatory surmised, has led to an increased rise in ethnic sectarianism in France and Belgium compared to their fellow European nations, arguing that the lack of integration into the labour market has coincided with increased self-segregation of migrant groups.
The report from the OID comes amid a growing collapse in Europe of the longstanding narrative that immigration was not only an economic necessity but a boon to the nations that fling their borders open. Indeed, just last month, Britain’s left-wing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said that the hypothesis that mass migration leads to economic growth has been “tested” and it “doesn’t hold”. Starmer went on to warn that unless the open borders project is reversed, Britain faces becoming an “island of strangers”.
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