Islam versus Europe

After the surprise government report yesterday concluding that immigration cost British jobs, some of the establishment spinmeisters are making feeble attempts to try and steer the narrative back on track.

But a recently published report showed that immigration had damaged the economies of all European countries, not just Britain. Here are its key findings:

Across all countries in Europe, immigrants tend to have lower levels of education than natives, with the exception of the UK. There is a large variation in educational attainments of immigrants according to their origin countries. Further, immigrants tend to have lower employment probabilities. Similarly, we find that in most countries immigrants hold jobs that are lower ranked in terms of their income potential, even conditional on education. This is particularly the case for non-EU immigrants, who are employed in lower ranked occupations than natives in all countries.

Investigation of the position of immigrants in the overall wage distribution of the receiving countries is – due to data availability - restricted to a subset of countries: Belgium, Germany, Finland, France and Italy. The picture that emerges is in line with our previous findings:

Immigrants are predominantly positioned at the lower parts of the overall wage distributions.

Again, we establish large differences according to origin country: While immigrants from the EU15 countries are fairly similarly distributed across wage distribution deciles to natives, immigrants from non-OECD countries are more likely than natives to be at the bottom of the wage distribution. Consistent with our results on employment probabilities and occupational distribution, differences in education and demographic characteristics between immigrants and natives do not explain these wage differences.

Disadvantage seems to be transferred to the next generation: We show that an overproportionally large fraction of the children of immigrants, in particular those from non-EU countries, grow up in households that are at the very bottom of the income distribution.

Source

This is an extensive study spanning several decades and extending across Europe. Its conclusion is clear. Immigration has made us poorer; and it will make us even more poor in future because the immigrants are having a disproportionately large number of children and "transferring their disadvantage" [actually our disadvantage] on to the next generation.

In all countries the descendants of non-EU immigrants account for a larger share of the children population than their parents’ share of the adult population, while the fraction of children of EU immigrants in the children population is slightly smaller than the share of their parents’ in the adult population.