Thread by @gaulicsmith

Some people suggest we use mass immigration to solve our shrinking old-age dependency ratios, but allow me to explain why this won’t work

https://twitter.com/stats_feed/status/1959573952289800472

In countries that have welfare states, you need more workers than retirees. It’s just simple path. How can a worker afford to pay for himself and a retiree ? It’s impossible. Instead, you split the cost of a small elderly population between a large workforce.

Typically you want about 4 workers per retiree. That means every worker is subsidizing about 1/4th of a retiree via taxes. If this number grows, it means taxes either have to go up on the workers on pensions need to be cut

Neither option is good. European tax burdens are already the highest in the world, usually between 30-40% of your income. Any more than that and people start to be crushed under the tax burdens. They already are to an extent, but at least they get some services out of it

Falling fertility in Europe has meant there are fewer and fewer workers around to pay for the elderly. What to do ? At this point, all reasonable policies to raise the fertility rate within the Overton window have been exhausted, so now they have embraced mass migration

The idea is simple: we don’t have enough people, lots of people want to come here, let’s let them in. Simple. But not so fast.

First, data has shown that non-Western migrants typically take in more taxes via services than they pay out. This is exactly the opposite of what we want. The whole idea was to import workers to boost tax revenues.

Instead, we’ve just imported more tax consumers. Not good !

But even if these immigrants did contributing a net positive return in taxes, we are still left with 2 major problems. First, assimilation.

It’s not entirely true that immigrations don’t assimilate. They do, and we know this because the children of immigrants have lower fertility than their parents. What this means is that we have to continuously import new immigrations.

Let’s say we need to import 30 million people to fix the old age dependency ratio (OADR). Fine, we do it. Their children have a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.5. The population begins shrinking again.

So this is not sustainable nor does it fix the root causes of low fertility.

The next problem is the scale of the immigration needed. If Germany aimed for a bare-minimum OADR by 2050, it would need an additional 25 MILLION immigration in the next 25 years, or 1 million per year. And this is with a bare minimum OADR.

For a ratio of 2 that means they will barely be able to afford their welfare system. This is the bare minimum. And this rate was only reached once in 2015 during the height of the migrant crisis.

But what about a healthy ratio of 4:1? For that, Germany would need like 80 million more immigrants by 2050, or 3.2 million per year. That would be 3x the 2015 rate and 6x the current net migration levels (though this clouds the fact 1.6M immigrated in 2024, 95% of whom stayed)

80 million is literally larger than the entire population of Germany today, meaning the entire native population of Germany will be replaced under this scheme.

So, in summary, the only sustainable way for Germany to fund its welfare and survive as a nation is for Germans to have more kids. Right now their TFR is at 1.39, down from 1.6 in 2016, so good luck with that.

+someone mentioned fertility is baked in, so existing population ratios, like Zoids and Gen D being a small gen then Boomers, means some change is inevitable. This is true, but if you find yourself in a hole, please stop digging