Now, to turn to the second grand delusion, open-door migration. It was against the background of seemingly permanent trade surpluses, German complacency about structural changes in the world economy and readily available central bank funding for low-cost public borrowing that, in 2015, Chancellor Merkel opened Germany’s borders to over a million non-European migrants in one year alone. They were mainly from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa who were allowed to pass themselves off to the immigration authorities as “Syrians”.
This was the second great delusion that the twisted German political mind unleashed upon Europe. The social, political and economic consequences have been profound. At a time when the EU is arrogating more powers to itself and making great strides in integrating most of Europe into one unified super-state, Germany and other parts especially of Western Europe are becoming less European every year. The EU empire is a centralised and nepotistic political structure, still expanding geographically through the policy of enlargement, European in name still but with an increasingly multi-racial ethnic and multicultural identity. Life in the EU is dominated by the worst of low level North American popular culture but without either the economic dynamism or the ruthless will to power of its transatlantic overlord.
Based on BAMF (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees) data, at least six million non-European immigrants arrived in Germany between 2010 and 2023, predominantly unskilled asylum migrants and their family members, the latter accounting for roughly one-fifth of the total. Together with children born in Germany to at least one non-European-origin parent during that period (approx. 2.6 million) the total rises to over about 8.5 million people, overwhelmingly consisting of asylum migrants, subsequent family reunification cases, and their descendants.
The long-term fiscal implications of migration on this scale are immense. Bernd Raffelhüschen’s well-known generational-accounting study estimated the aggregate long-run fiscal cost of recent asylum migration to Germany at approximately €5.8 trillion. Spread over an assumed 40-year remaining lifetime horizon, this corresponds to annual fiscal costs of roughly €145 billion per year for the next four decades, equivalent in 2023 to approximately seven to eight per cent of total German fiscal revenue. Worse still, Raffelhüschen’s estimates relate only to first-generation migrants, do not take account of descendants and rest on comparatively optimistic assumptions regarding the future labour-market integration and fiscal contribution of their descendants.
Raffelhüschen’s findings are broadly corroborated by Jan van de Beek’s updated Dutch study, which similarly concludes that non-Western asylum and family migration to a modern welfare state imposes very large negative lifetime fiscal effects. Van de Beek estimates average discounted net fiscal costs for first-generation asylum migrants in the hundreds of thousands of euros per person, with several origin groups from Africa and the Middle East generating estimated lifetime net costs approaching or exceeding €500,000 under baseline assumptions, with sensitivity regions reaching up to €890,000 per migrant.
Importantly, van de Beek further concludes that negative fiscal effects persist into the second generation for many non-Western migrant groups rather than disappearing through automatic labour-market integration. Similar conclusions have also been reached in Danish fiscal studies of non-Western migration. Hansen, Schultz-Nielsen and Tranæs conclude that immigrants from Western countries have a positive fiscal impact, while immigrants from non-Western countries have a large negative one, even when non-refugee immigrants are taken into consideration.
Applying Raffelhüschen’s headline total fiscal burden figure of €5.8 trillion which is broadly supported by other fiscal impact studies and assuming that non-European immigration into Germany stopped in 2023 – which patently it did not – and assuming a conservative average lifetime expectancy of forty years per migrant, the average annual fiscal burden to the German state of €145 billion amounts to over three per cent of Germany aggregate GDP in 2023 of €4.7 trillion, even before accounting for subsequent chain migration, additional future first-generation migration, or the fiscal impact of descendants born in Germany since 2015.
The current German government is evincing no serious intention of containing, let alone stopping, unqualified mass migration. With migration continuing, the cost of migration will continue to rise, not fall. Moreover, if van de Beek’s findings regarding the persistence of negative net fiscal contributions into the second and third generations are substantially correct, then these fiscal pressures cannot plausibly be regarded as temporary. From now, year on year, the cost of migration will absorb a steadily increasing share of both German public expenditure and of German GDP.
Nonetheless, even considering only the projected costs associated with first-generation migration, the implied fiscal burden is extraordinarily large for an already stagnating economy facing rapidly rising pension, welfare and defence expenditures. Mass migration has therefore been a calamitously misconceived response to Germany’s demographic problems. In the absence of extensive remigration of illegal and unqualified migrants, the long-term fiscal pressures generated by current migration policy will place the German welfare state under increasingly unsustainable strain.
Without either a stop to asylum migration or extensive remigration, Germany in twenty-five to thirty years from now will no longer be a recognisably European country, and neither will many of the other major Western European countries. For years their economies have been recording some of the lowest growth in the OECD league tables. Within little more than a generation living standards in the western parts of the EU (with the probable exception of Ireland and Denmark and perhaps the Netherlands and Spain) will have declined sharply and may be approaching those in Latin America.
I will write about the third great German delusion, the green transformation, in my next column later this week.
(End of Part II)
Dr Gunnar Beck is a legal academic and practising barrister specialising in EU law. He has been Reader in EU law at SOAS University of London since 2005, and also taught at Oxford University, the LSE and MCC in Budapest. He was an MEP from 2019-2024 for AfD and deputy legal adviser (EU law) at the London House of Commons until 2010.
Part I: How Germany is destroying itself and the EU