Demography and Employment in Europe

My reflections on this third Sunday of Advent are prompted by an article published this morning in the Spanish online newspaper ‘El Confidencial’, undoubtedly one of the most widely read and influential.
This newspaper reports data from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics which indicates that during the years 2022 and 2023 Spain has gained 1,150,000 inhabitants, although the vegetative growth – that is, the growth caused by the difference between births and deaths within the country – has been negative, so that the increase in population is entirely due to the massive influx of immigrants.
The National Institute of Statistics does not distinguish between legal immigrants, with residence or residence and work permits, and illegal immigrants, because in Spain, since the time of Aznar – when the more or less continuous and persistent arrival of immigrants began – citizens have no reliable information on the number of immigrants staying illegally or irregularly on national territory.
The article also echoes Eurostat data, according to which Spain only grew by 525,097 inhabitants in 2023 (some 20,000 fewer than Spain acknowledges); Germany grew by 333,000 and France by 229,000; while Italy, for example, saw its population fall by 7,452. I have no doubt that the measures implemented by the Italian government to control borders and illegal immigration since 2022 have had this effect. As population growth is almost negative throughout Europe, only those countries that have taken measures to prevent the flood of immigration are at risk of reducing their population.

According to the European Union’s statistical observatory, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Italy, Slovakia and Bulgaria will thus lose population in the period from 1 January 2023 to 1 January 2024. My reasoning, if you will allow me the lack of modesty, is correct. During that period Poland was under the government of the conservative Law and Justice coalition, implementing border control measures, like Orbán in Hungary. On the other hand, the population growth due to the arrival of immigrants is led by Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, but also Portugal and Ireland, two countries that in recent months have experienced problems arising from immigration processes and conflicts of coexistence.
Eurostat also analyses the so-called adjusted net migration, i.e. the difference between immigrants and emigrants; departures from and entries into the country, with the result that Spain leads this figure, more than twice as much as France and more than three times as much as Italy.
Spain already has a foreign population of around 18%, with numbers perfectly comparable to those of Sweden or Germany, but why is there no collective explosion in response to these phenomena? Fundamentally, because most of these immigrants come from Latin America, sharing culture, language and religion with Spaniards.
These data have immediate consequences or effects: for example, the arrival of 1 million immigrants, of adult age, in two years, has led to a brutal increase in housing prices since – the supply of flats built is practically not growing as a result of the lack of public incentives of any kind – the market is completely unbalanced. The supply remains practically unchanged, but demand is brutally increasing.
The same is true of the pressure that these more than one million immigrants exert on public services, since approximately 900,000 of the jobs created are occupied by foreigners, with the result that almost 300,000 are an additional cost for the health and education systems, the transport network and the housing market itself, as well as for security.
And this is because, according to the Bank of Spain, 76% of the new jobs have gone to foreigners and only 24% to Spaniards, who thus maintain high unemployment figures. In Italy, however, the ratio is the opposite, with 75% of new jobs going to Italians and a quarter to immigrants.
The proportion is worse in Swedenwhere, according to the Bank of Spain, 100% of job creation in 2023 has gone to immigrants and the employment of the Swedish-born has fallen, with Germany and the Netherlands maintaining equally high proportions of foreign hiring. In all these countries, and particularly in Spain, there is a high and constant level of unemployment among those born in the country:

1. all countries in Europe continue to create jobs despite the fact that economic growth is not particularly strong.
2º. As these are jobs with lower paid jobs, they are taken over by the immigrant population, which leads to a fall in average wages, and in many cases, as they have low wages, they continue to depend on the welfare state.
Thus, the pressure on public services is constantly increasing, as is the urgency for the social democratic states (practically all of them) to continue to increase the tax burden on the European middle and working classes. The question is clear: will this be bearable? How far and how long will the systems of the so-called welfare state be able to cope?