The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Immigration: Social Costs vs. Economic Benefits || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Its easy to sit up in an ivory tower and say immigration is always good because of the economic benefits; however, turning a blind eye to the social implications of immigration would be irresponsible in a well-rounded discussion. Here's what Canada and Germany have going on: Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/immigration-social-costs-vs-economic-benefits

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from the top of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolome in Yosemite, just below Glen Allen. This is where I'm going to be hiking for the next couple of days. Not bad. Today we are taking an entry from the Ask Peter Forum, and it is, could you go through the numbers as to the pros and cons of mass immigration into countries, specifically like Canada and Germany? people always talk about the economic upside and the tax upside, but they rarely talk about the downside, things like crime and social identity. It's a reasonable question. And as we have more and more countries that are aging, sorry, I'm just going to pan around. And since we have more countries that are basically aging out, immigration is often brought up as one of the few, if only possible patches or even solutions. Let's start by saying that Canada is this very special case.

Canada knew that they were on a German-style demographic implosion 30 years ago, and then under the Harper government, and then later under the Trudeau government, the decision was made to open the floodgates and become an immigrant country. And so you've probably had, I mean, they don't count the statistics the same way we do in the United States. You probably had three to four million immigrants coming and become Canadians in that time period. And most of them, in their 20s and their 30s, they specifically were going after people who were younger,

as opposed to most of the migrants that they got before. and that's managed to stabilize the number, but only so long as they keep those inflows coming because Native Canadians, to use a charge term, still have a very, very low birth rate, so there's no replacement coming on. And so you have a very different social fabric developing. Anyway, the numbers, which I don't have top of mind, I apologize, are unequivocal. The new migrants, especially for underage 40, generate far more in tax in payments than they do in tax take over their lifetime. And it's definitely a net fiscal benefit. In terms of the jobs as a rule, the people who are doing the migration tend to be the more aggressive and the more skilled and

the more educated of their countrymen from where they came from. And so you tend to get a kick up in terms of labor productivity. Not everybody's in Elon Musk, but you get the idea. The third is crime. Unequivalical data on this. In every country that collects this sort of data, crime committed by immigrants is significantly lower, typically at least a third lower than it is by the natives born population. So that goes out of the way too. The fourth, there's something that people usually don't think about, and that's education. In the United States, it costs over 150 grand to graduate a kid from high school. That's just the government cost for education. That doesn't cost, the societal cost of actually raising the kid from zero to 18 when health care

can be an issue as well in terms of cost. One of the benefits of migrants is that, you know, they've already paid that in another country and you're just benefiting from their labor. So economically, by the statistics, it's a very, very, very easy case to make. Two things to keep in mind. Number one, not all migrants are the same. So for example, if you think of the United Kingdom and Indian migrants and family reunification. Basically, the UK would bring in one person from India who might meet all of these numerical criteria that they just talked about. But then they bring in their extended family and all of a sudden you've got 60 Indian

Brits, half of whom are over 60. Different sort of math there. If you're bringing in near retirees, the cost of the society can be very, very high. Also, for example, in the German case, the migrants that came in from Syria, there were about a million of them and they were about 80 to 90% male. So you're not getting too much of a demographic boost there because there weren't women to then have more children. And that brings us to the second complicating factor. That's social cohesion.

If you have included immigration as part of your social fabric going back decades and preferably even centuries, then the difficulty of society absorbing a number of people from different places, places is relatively low. So when you look at the seller states such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, in Canada, you know, this is something that we have done in phases. We run hot and cold for a very, very long time. And so if you tell somebody that your parents are from a different country, most Americans aren't even going to blake because people in the United States assimilated very, very quickly. But if you don't have that culture, like Germany does not have that culture and you suddenly open the floodgates, then all of a sudden you look very, very different.

So the first real wave of migration into Germany happened with the Bosnian wars in the 1990s. The Germans did the right thing for the right reason. It took in a lot of refugees from that conflict, but it changed the social character. They now have done it again in the 2000s with Syrians, changing the social character. They're in the process of doing it again with Ukrainians, changing the social character. And if you wait too long, if you wait till you have more people in their 40s than their 30s than their 20s than the 10s than their zeros, then you will be a different place. And this is the situation that the Canadians are facing not right now, but will in 20 or 30 years. They waited until it was very late in the day and then they started bringing in millions of people.

if this happens over a long enough period, society, the new society and the old society can adapt. But in the German situation, it's happened so recently. And to keep it up, the Germans are going to have to bring in two to two and a half million people under age 30 every year for the next 20 years just to fold where they are demographically. Well, those people will be the majority of the country by that. That's a very different place. So if you look at immigration is purely a math issue, a fiscal issue, an economic growth issue. It's a slam dunk case, but we don't live in that work. And you know what we call the gap between the ideal and reality?

Politics.