Europe is being left behind on automation. With a fertility rate of 1.38 children per woman in 2023—that is, well below the 2.1 needed for population replacement—and a median age of 44.4, Europe’s rapidly shrinking workforce threatens our economic vitality, the viability of our generous welfare models and, indeed, the continent’s relevance in a shifting global order. The Brussels mandarinate has long argued that it is essential to fill labour gaps in our ageing, low-fertility societies, and that much is true; but it has claimed that the sole way of doing so is by opening Europe’s border to vast numbers of foreign workers. However, this policy has strained social cohesion, with a 2025 YouGov poll showing that Europeans overwhelmingly believe immigration has been too high in recent years. Indeed, this is the case in Germany (81 per cent of Germans think so), Spain (80 per cent), Sweden (73 per cent), Italy (71 per cent), and France (69 per cent). Europeans, in fact, are right—and they must be heard.
This migratory tidal wave has also fuelled economic pressures. Germany’s rental prices have surged by over 50 per cent in the last decade; Portugal’s real estate inflation reached a massive 16.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Sensible people across the ideological spectrum—and this includes most right-wingers as well as some rational leftists, such as Denmark’s Social Democratic government—understand none of this is tolerable or sustainable.
Automation, however, offers a better, indeed urgent path: A technological revolution to secure economic independence, reduce reliance on foreign labour, and restore the social unity that everyone since Aristotle has known to be the irreplaceable foundation of stable democracies. Lagging disastrously behind China’s complete domination of the processes collectively known as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR), Europe must act swiftly to avoid suffering the fate that once befell Qing China and pre-British India, both historical centres of global prosperity that suffered the consequences of impoverishment, backwardness, foreign bullying, and geopolitical irrelevance due to their inability to modernise in time. If Europe doesn’t understand where the wind is blowing, its very own “Century of Humiliation” might be an inevitability.
Over five million immigrants came into the EU from non-EU countries in 2022 alone, most of them coming to fulfil low-paying, exclusion-inducing, low-skilled jobs. This has driven up housing costs, badly strained public services, and bred social conflict and anomie. A general drive towards automation would eliminate this dangerous collective addiction. In advanced sectors of the economy, technology already outperforms human labour. In industrial manufacturing, for instance, BMW’s Munich plant uses 1,200 robots to assemble 1,600 vehicles daily, boosting output by 25 per cent over manual lines.
In construction, too, the Dutch firm CyBe’s 3D concrete printers can now build homes in 24 hours, cutting human labour needs by half. In agriculture, China is hard at work replacing the human-driven tractors of the past with self-driving electric vehicles. Its “dark factories” are, perhaps, the most potent example of the spectacular gains in productivity enabled by automation: Xiaomi’s new Changping facility, for instance, works day and night to produce about 10 million smartphones a year, all with almost zero human input. These examples show Europe can address labour shortages without importing social friction. The tale that we need to import massive amounts of foreign labour to keep our economy afloat is a lie, and it should be denounced as such. Indeed, even with rising labour costs and lower unemployment than the EU, only about 0.1 per cent of China’s population is foreign-born—and the PRC seems to be doing just fine.
Beijing’s overwhelming dominance of the automation revolution is testament to the shocking ineptitude of our faux elites. The numbers are sobering. In 2023 alone, the People’s Republic installed 290,258 industrial robots, or 52 per cent of the world’s total. That means an automation density of 470 robots per 10,000 workers, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Europe, meanwhile, trails the Chinese at 219 robots per 10,000 human workers, with Germany at 415, Spain at 231, and Romania at 52. So where is China’s stellar performance coming from? Largely from $150 billion (€131 billion) invested on tech subsidies since 2020. The most depressing bit, perhaps? This is actually less than what the EU has directly spent on the Ukraine war since its beginning, in 2022, and a tiny fraction of the overall economic impact of the war—including sanctions, buying more expensive gas from suppliers other than Russia, etc—suffered by the continent.
Obviously, a sensible energy policy is needed to fuel automation. You can’t have one without the other. Robots and AI data centres will require vast amounts of energy—global data centre consumption will rise 160 per cent by 2030; all this power will have to be coming from somewhere. Europe’s energy crisis, worsened by sanctions on Russian gas and a deliberate policy to cut European consumers from Moscow-supplied energy, has instead pushed German electricity costs to €0.25 per kWh. That is triple China’s own prices, at €0.08. Any program for a viable, automated, relevant Europe of the 21st century will fail miserably unless it tackles this objective fact head-on. It is appalling, for instance, that a 2024 DIHK (Germany’s Chamber of Industry) survey found 30 per cent of German manufacturers cite energy costs as a barrier to automation. Automation, therefore, would require a pragmatic mix—expanding nuclear (only 26 per cent of EU electricity in 2023), securing gas, and maintaining coal—must ensure European competitiveness in our new robotic age. We won’t be going anywhere without it.
But the crux of the matter, here, is that automation isn’t just about the grand goals of economic or geopolitical survival; it is about the very practical and immediate objective of restoring tranquillity to Europe’s streets and communities. The UberEats and other low-qualification services now widespread across European cities and almost always performed by cheap, imported labour could perfectly be assured by self-driving robots and even delivery drones. Automated factories could relieve millions of workers, freeing vast numbers of much needed domestic labour. Automation can cure Europe of its cheap, foreign labour addition. China, again, is rapidly implementing these solutions to achieve continued growth even as its labour costs boom and its population, too, stagnates. So why aren’t we?
To secure its survival, Europe must now adopt a grand automation strategy. Time is of the essence; we need to be bold. It is nothing short of insane that the Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, valued at €723 billion euros, allocates only 21 per cent of this enormous sum to digital transformation while showering almost 40 per cent of available funds to “green measures”. Yet, it is automation that would drastically curb migrant labour needs and usher in a new era of reindustrialisation, rapid growth, and sovereign development. That we are doing the opposite of this, instead splashing limited funds on wars and the green religion, will make its way to the chronicles as evidence of how disastrously foolish, amateurish, and incapable this European political class actually is. Indeed, if Europe does go under, it will do so largely by choice.
EU needs to play smarter against China, not harder