1% = 2% is the equation that Donald Trump, Santiago Abascal, Nigel Farage, Jimmie Åkesson, and others who made a political career out of using immigration as a scapegoat never talk about. And it is not due to a lack of ability for analytical reasoning.
“Migrants increase GDP per person and productivity: A 1 percentage point increase in the share of migrants in the adult population increases GDP per person in advanced economies by up to 2 percent in the longer term.” IMF
But the rest of us should be aware of it. Particularly those of us living in Western developed countries, where cost-benefit analysis does not yield optimistic results without adding new people to the workforce. With only Iceland and Israel being countries where families produce enough children to maintain existing population levels, all other Western countries fall into the group where the native-born population is contracting. Another piece of data to keep in mind is that every doctor costs over 300.000€ to train.
So, without the replacement ratio of 2.1 child per woman, and investing more money into education, any rational CBA struggles to come up with a scenario where the state of welfare has enough resources to pay for the pensions, health, education, and all other services that hold society together.
So next time you hear the drumming of that famous tune of “build the wall for barbarians are coming, please remember that 1 = 2.
Or if you prefer poetry to mathematics, read «Waiting for the Barbarians» by Constantine P. Cavafy and its final verse:
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
