Labor Mobility
As things now stand, the European population is set to decline over the next 50 years. Couples are having fewer children, having them later or not having them at all. While the populations of Asia, Africa and America will grow, Europe will shrink.
In the Fifties and Sixties, the average manual worker worked 48 years, 48 weeks per year and 48 hours (including overtime). He retired at 65. Women worked with more interruptions, fewer years and fewer hours, and retired at 60. Men and women did not live many years beyond retirement.
Now we all live longer beyond retirement. Men’s working patterns resemble women’s more and more - interrupted working with the need to change jobs, to train and develop new skills. Our savings while in work are insufficient to finance our spending in retirement.
Pensions of the presently retired are paid out of the savings of the currently working. If the cohort working is large relative to those retired, pensions will pose no problem. But Europe’s population is not growing very fast.
Some countries such as Italy face the prospect of a shrinking population. By 2050, Europe’s population is predicted to be smaller than it is now if we rely on reproduction alone. With a shrinking population, Europe will not be able to fund its pensions without taking drastic steps.
The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN calculated some years ago that Europe needs to import between 150 to 200 million extra people over the next 20 to 30 years if the age structure of the population is to have enough people of a working age.
We all speak of globalisation and the free movement of capital across borders. Trade is also growing with fewer restrictions and lower tariffs. But nations states everywhere jealously guard their frontiers and discriminate between their citizens and foreigners.
This was not the case in the 19th century when we had a similar phase of globalisation. Then people as well as commodities and capital moved freely. One third of Europe’s population moved across to North America and thus improved Europe’s chances of development immensely. People moved from India to the Caribbean, eastern and southern Africa, to South-east Asia and the South Pacific islands. Chinese people moved across the Pacific to the Americas, to Australia (till the Whites Only policy stopped their movements in 1900) and to South-east Asia. It was only in the 20th century, after the First World War, that the labelling of citizens and foreigners became general.
If we want to be generous in allowing people to migrate to us, we cannot at the same time be generous in their entitlements. They would have to work and would not be able to claim unemployment benefits till after they had qualified as citizens.
“Let People Come Here from All Over the World,” by Meghnad Desai