Mass migration is wrecking Europe’s economies
OVER the last two years or so, as longer-term readers know, we have steadily dismantled the intellectual case for mass uncontrolled immigration.
We have shown, clearly, how it is bad for the economy, bad for the housing crisis, bad for social cohesion, bad for crime, and especially bad for women and girls.
And now, here in the UK, the people are catching up. As the opinion polls show, in recent months the British have become much more sceptical about mass immigration, and more convinced it is changing their country for the worse.
This not only helps to explain the rapid rise of Reform but also an outbreak of mass public protests and the ‘raising the flag’ campaign, all of which should be seen as acts of resistance against this extreme policy of mass immigration. Put all this together and I think it’s now obvious we are winning the argument.
And now, thanks to some research in Finland, where I was giving a talk this week, our argument has become even stronger. Drawing on a wealth of data, researchers in Finland have found exactly the same thing as a growing number of studies elsewhere in Europe. Mass immigration is weakening, not strengthening, their economy.
Typically, what these studies do is look at the average taxes and other financial contributions that are made to the state by different groups and then subtract what these groups receive back in terms of things like welfare and public services.
And when the Finns looked at this, they found something that completely blows apart the ‘immigration is good for the economy’ narrative that is routinely presented to us by the elite class and the institutions they dominate.
Overall, they found immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa impose enormous fiscal costs on Finland’s economy — costs that are routinely downplayed if not ignored in the wider conversation about immigration.
In fact, they found the net cost of just one asylum seeker from the Middle East to Finnish taxpayers amounts to some €730,000 (£633,000) over the course of a lifetime, with migrants from Iraq and Somalia especially costly to the public purse.
In the other words, the financial impact of each migrant from the Middle East amounts to roughly 700,000 euros (£600,000), which is significant given that millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have flooded into Europe, both legally and illegally.
But surely this study is some kind of freak outlier, right?
Not at all.
It is actually remarkably consistent with the findings of a similar study in the Netherlands, which found an overall net cost of some €660,000 (£572,000) per migrant.
And it is consistent with recent findings here in the UK, where the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates an average lifetime cost to British taxpayers for each low-wage migrant of somewhere between £150,000 and £1million, depending on how long they live. Just think about that for a moment.
In fact, like these studies, I would argue that the evidence emerging across much of Europe is telling us a remarkably consistent story, even if it is one you will not hear on BBC Verify or other politically correct ‘fact-checking’ platforms.
Like the study that was conducted by Denmark’s Ministry of Finance in 2023 or the major study by Dutch Professor Jan van de Beek the same year: both found the same as those studies in Finland and the UK.
Low-wage, low-skill and less productive migrants coming into European nations in very large numbers, often from radically different if not incompatible cultures across the Middle East and Africa, are a major fiscal burden. They take more out of Western economies than they put in.
You can see this in the chart below, which puts the studies from Denmark and the Netherlands together, comparing the net contribution of migrants by their countries of origin. The results are remarkably similar.
Consistently, immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Morocco, Turkey, and Pakistan, among others, are a net fiscal cost to Europe, undermining the prosperity of Western nations by taking more out of these economies than they are putting in.
Which is why, here in the UK, the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of mass immigration created by Boris Johnson and the so-called Conservative Party between 2019 and 2024, has been so destructive for the economy and indeed our country.
It’s not just that Johnson and the Tories betrayed their own voters by promising they would ‘lower the overall numbers’ and ‘regain control’ only to then do the very opposite by putting mass immigration on steroids.
It’s that they flooded the country with exactly the wrong kind of migrants, which is now one big reason why we have dismal rates of growth, weak GDP-per-capita, declining living standards and the managed decline you see today.
The Tories did this and we should never forget the Tories did this, and this is no doubt why today even renegade members of the elite class, such as Professor David Miles, are breaking rank, speaking out against the lazy consensus.
Pointing to the findings I have summarised above, and others, Miles has dared to state the obvious by saying it makes much more sense to get millions of British people off welfare and back to work than continue to import masses of cheap migrant labour.
Ultimately, this policy is eroding our prosperity, putting unbearable pressure on public services and pushing the state into what is known as a ‘population trap’, whereby the pace and scale of demographic change is so great that the state can no longer perform its core functions, such as providing its own people with affordable and available housing, a functioning health service, and controlling the borders.
Here’s what I wrote last month in reaction to that important intervention by Miles: ‘We need, in short, to urgently create a policy and cultural mix that generates real and meaningful incentives for British families to have more children while getting millions of British people back into the labour market and creating new incentives for business to prioritise them. The answer to our looming demographic crisis . . . is not to press down even harder on the pedal of mass immigration but get British people back to work while looking for new ways to boost our birth-rate.’
Across Europe, too, the picture, as those studies show, is becoming crystal clear.
The extreme experiment of mass uncontrolled immigration — which is exactly what it is, an experiment — is wrecking our economies and destroying our nations.
While elites repeat in robotic fashion that we need masses of immigrants from across the Middle East and Africa to ‘replace’ our ageing Western workers, the blunt reality is that we are not replacing like for like.
Far from it.
We are replacing Western workers who positively contribute to the public purse with masses of low-skill, low-wage and typically poorly educated migrants from outside Europe, from very different nations, who are a net fiscal cost.
This isn’t only very bad policy; it’s also draining if not destroying Western economies and, in turn, the cultures and societies that surround them.
And it needs to stop, now, before it’s too late.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin’s substack on September 4, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
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