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The popular myth about immigrants is that they will 'take' something from the country they enter - that they will grab jobs or sponge off welfare systems. The reality is very different. Most industrial economies would be worse off without the help of immigrant workers, and without this injection of new blood the receiving countries will see their populations age and decline even more rapidly.
THE CRUDEST WAY of assessing the value of immigration is to look at the countries that have received large numbers of immigrants, and ponder whether this has done them much harm. The world's dominant economy, and one of the richest, is the United States - a country populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants. The US population has more than doubled over the last century, yet the country has become wealthier and wealthier. You could say the same of the other major countries of immigration, such as Australia and Canada - and make a similar case for South Africa which is by far Africa's richest country and remains a magnet for immigrants. In Asia the country with the highest proportion of immigrants - around one quarter of the workforce - is Singapore, again one of the richest countries in the region. Within Europe, the country that has received the most immigrants in recent years is Germany, which has long been one of Europe's economic powerhouses. And the European countries with the largest proportions of immigrant workers, Switzerland and Luxembourg, are also the wealthiest. In fact, of the world's major industrial economies only Japan has not had significant influxes of migrant workers.
A statistical analysis in 2001 for 15 European countries over the period 1991-95 found that for every 1 per cent increase in a country's population through immigration there was an increase in Gross Domestic Product of 1.25 to 1.5 per cent1. Of course this does not mean that immigration caused the increase in wealth - association is not the same as causation. And it could be argued that immigrants headed for such countries precisely because they were rich, and that without immigrants these countries would have been richer still. But would Germany be as wealthy without the energy of all its immigrant workers? Would the United States...