Italy needs more migrants in order to pay for the population's pensions, the country's social security chief said Wednesday, drawing the ire of anti-immigration interior minister Matteo Salvini.
If we halved migratory flows "in five years we would lose population equivalent to that of Turin", Boeri said referring to the country's important northern industrial hub.
If immigration were reduced to zero we would lose "700,000 people under 34 years of age in the space of one parliamentary mandate", he told the lower house of parliament.
Italy is suffering a demographic decline with one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. Boeri said he was concerned that "no one seems to care" about this decline in Italy and recommended maintaining a flow of legal migration, which alone, he said, could ensure the balance of Italy's pension fund. ...
Immigrants make positive contributions to social insurance funding on net. The idea that one can replace lost population due to low birth rates with immigrants is not plausible for most countries. Babies are born at age 0. Migrants come into a country usually at working age but then they too age into retirement that much sooner. Thus they affect the population age structure much more slowly than would a sustained increase in birth rates.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 1990s, the UN population division looked at this concept of "replacement migration" by asking how many migrants per year would it take to keep the ratio of 15-64 years to 65+ year olds constant in various countries with low birth rates. The required numbers to offset the aging of the population are are very, very large.
see: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm
Or, Italians and Americans could just have more kids instead of 1+ per woman, more like 3-4.
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