Demonising migrants won’t fill jobs or boost falling populations

Migration has rocketed worldwide, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries and the relative ease of travel. Since 1990, the number of people living outside the country of their birth has doubled to 300 million.

But as well as greater supply, there has been rising demand. The birth rate in all rich countries, apart from Israel, has fallen well below the replacement rate at which population levels are stable. This is the first time in history that there has been a sustained drop in populations without war, famine or disease as a trigger. As a result, more and more countries are becoming dependent on migrant labour to sustain shrinking and ageing workforces.

Germany will need annual net migration of close to 300,000 until 2040 to sustain its labour force. In the US, immigrants account for about one in five healthcare workers and the sector faced acute staff shortages even before the second Trump administration. In Britain, the care sector emerged from lockdown with record vacancies – and a commensurate need for migrant workers.

This, then, rubs up against age-old hostility to outsiders and fear of social change. Concern about rising migration in rich states is the single biggest reason for the worldwide rise of the radical right. In the UK, it has helped Reform to the top of the polls and made asylum hotels magnets for protest; voters now see it as the most important issue facing the country and substantial majorities think numbers are too high.

Previously fringe views are creeping towards the mainstream. Twenty years ago, the BNP was condemned by all other parties and across the rightwing media for pledging to introduce voluntary “remigration” for British citizens who were born, or whose parents were born, in other countries. It is now the policy of two independent MPs, Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock, who were originally elected for Reform, and there has been little criticism from others on the right. Lowe has a large and fervent following on social media, and the former Tory candidate for mayor of London, Susan Hall, has joined the advisory board of his new campaign group, Restore Britain.

Elsewhere, the far-right AfD – which has expressed support for remigration policies in the past – continues to make progress in Germany. And in the US, Donald Trump has won Congressional approval to more than treble the budget for immigration enforcement so he can ramp up deportations, ensnaring plenty of people with a legal right to live there and causing terror across US cities.

But those who support these shifts, and see mass migration as an existential threat to national identity, struggle to explain how their countries will manage declining populations without bringing in more working-age adults. One popular idea on the radical right – that the need could be negated through schemes to boost native fertility – runs up against the failure of any country to do so, including those like Hungary, which has put significant resources into trying. Policies such as improved childcare, cash payments to parents and better access to housing can make a small difference at the margins but cannot overcome more fundamental changes in gender roles, or the cultural impact of the internet, which means young people spend much less time socialising in person.

Some anti-immigration activists will admit they prefer the idea of gradual economic decay to solving the population problem through migration, but no government can realistically let standards of living go into permanent decline. Voters may worry about immigration, but that doesn’t mean they won’t blame the government if they can’t pay their bills and there is no one to look after their ageing parents.

Japan is a case study in how these tensions play out. Its population has fallen every year since 2009 and the birth rate has collapsed. Fewer than 700,000 babies were born there last year, the lowest figure since 1899, and down from a mid-1970s peak of 2.5 million. But, historically, it has had very low levels of immigration. Indeed, it has often been praised by the western radical right for maintaining its ethnic purity. This is now changing under demographic pressure. In each of the past three years, the number of foreign residents living there has increased by about 10% to reach a record 3.8 million. Most are from poorer Asian countries and on work visas, filling holes left by the falling population.

These are still much lower numbers than in the US or western European countries, and very few are asylum seekers. Yet the increase in foreigners has still led to the rise of a radical right party – Sanseito – whose slogan is “Japanese First”. In recent elections to Japan’s upper house, they achieved a major breakthrough, increasing their seat total from one to 14. Their answer to how Japan should manage population decline without immigration is another that’s popular among radical right parties worldwide: that AI and robotics can take the place of human workers (one reason why Elon Musk is so obsessed with building humanoid robots). But Japan has the most advanced robotics in the world – allowing, for instance, care homes to look after older people with fewer staff, and it still needs immigrant workers to cope.

Western politicians have spent the past few decades desperately trying to find a way to manage these tensions and balance their desire for GDP growth against rhetorical solidarity with voter unhappiness over migration levels. In most cases they’ve done so by tacitly encouraging economic migration, while making a lot of noise about irregular (often called illegal) immigration by refugees. The UK had the madcap Conservative scheme to deport people to Rwanda. In practice, this contributed to a huge backlog of asylum seekers stuck in hotels as the party refused to process migrants who could – in theory – be deported, creating flashpoints for the kind of public anger we’ve recently seen in Epping. EU countries are working with a number of north African countries to prevent people leaving, to the dismay of human rights activists, and plan on processing prospective refugees in centres based outside of Europe. In the US, Trump has militarised the Mexican border.

There have been some attempts to tighten up routes for legal migration at the margins: in the UK, most international students are no longer allowed to bring dependents, and the salary required to be given a visa has gone up (though not for NHS workers). But net migration is still expected to be about 200,000-300,000 for the foreseeable future – well above historic levels.

Even countries with radical right governments are attempting the same strategy. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has pushed EU colleagues to go further on reducing irregular migration, while quietly pushing through two increases in the number of visas available for non-EU workers (alongside already high levels of migration from eastern Europe). Closer to home, the new Reform administration in Kent recently wrote to the home secretary complaining that new rules preventing care homes from hiring from abroad would “leave providers on a cliff edge”. In opposition, it is easy to use immigrants as a punching bag but, when governing, the trade-offs become more apparent.

The theory behind focusing on irregular migration is that public concern is mostly about control, rather than numbers per se. Across the population as a whole, this is broadly true – there is fairly widespread support for migrants who “pay their way”. But those voting for Reform are also upset by demographic changes that are driven far more by legal migration than by small boats. Thus the endless hyperbolic headlines in the rightwing press about the rising non-white population and schools with few white children. So even if governments are able to significantly reduce irregular arrivals, immigrants will remain convenient scapegoats for populist resentment at broader societal failures.

At the same time, it is going to become increasingly difficult to maintain the levels of economic migration required to sustain labour markets facing demographic decline. To date, demand to come to rich countries has been so strong that it has been possible for governments to allow in the necessary numbers but then treat them badly to play to domestic audiences.

UK visa fees are an egregious example. Successive governments have ramped them up hugely over the past decade as a popular way to fill holes in budgets. The settlement fee to claim indefinite leave to remain has risen by almost 2,000% since 2003 when it was £155. This year it is £3,029. The surcharge those on temporary visas have to pay for access to the NHS has increased by more than 500% since 2015. A skilled worker with a partner and two children now has to pay more than £42,000 for his or her family, from arrival to gaining full citizenship, on top of all the taxes that apply to the rest of us.

But demand for migrants is going to keep growing, owing to falling birthrates worldwide, while supply shrinks for the same reason. To date, emigration hasn’t been a big political issue in most countries, with high numbers leaving because birth rates have been so high. But falling birth rates across middle-income countries, as well as rich ones, are changing the dynamic. Global births peaked in 2016. Currently, only 94 countries are above replacement rate, and that’s projected to fall to 49 by 2050. India has seen more emigration than any other country over the past few decades, but its birth rate fell below replacement in 2019 and continues to drop.

When emigration is combined with a falling population, it has a magnifying and destabilising effect. For instance, Romania and Bulgaria have experienced net emigration in almost every year since the fall of communism, the latter losing about 30% of its population. This has boosted support for radical right and anti-establishment parties because of the dislocation caused by so many people leaving, and has done economic damage as younger, better qualified people have left in high numbers. It has also forced both governments to rely more on foreign workers from poorer countries, which then contributes to conspiracies about the native population being replaced. Because Romania and Bulgaria are in the EU, freedom of movement means they can’t stop people leaving. But other countries could.

We’re starting to see how this could play out in the healthcare sector, where global demand for migrants is insatiable. The UK and US have been reliant on international recruitment for a while: last year, 40% of nurses recruited into the NHS were non-EU citizens. Now other countries, such as Germany, that have traditionally relied on home-grown staff, are also becoming more reliant on international recruitment. The effect has been to put huge pressure on healthcare systems in middle-income countries and attempts to stem the flow.

Earlier this year, Nigeria announced new rules that require newly trained nurses to work in the country for two years before being eligible to work abroad. Given Nigeria is the third-largest provider of international nurses to the NHS, this may well have a knock-on effect on the ability of hospital trusts here to recruit. Ghana and South Africa have introduced similar rules, as have some Indian states (India is the largest provider of NHS nurses).

This is a pattern that will become more prevalent across a wider range of skilled professions, as middle-income countries seek to keep more of their graduates and drops in birth rates become more widespread. As the competition for skilled workers heats up, many countries will have to move from grudging acceptance of economic migration to active efforts to recruit, which will cause further concerns about social and cultural change.

How rich states manage this tension will be a key political dynamic over the coming decades. Combining tacit support for economic migration with rhetorical hostility will not be sustainable – both because that hostility will mean losing out in the global competition for workers, but also because voters who object to migration can see right through it, undermining trust further.

At some point, politicians will have to change the conversation and explain the real trade-offs to voters. Until then, we’ll keep going round in circles.