Greg Cochran writes:
Someone polled a number of prominent economists whether the influx of refugees into Germany beginning in 2015 will generate net economic benefits for German citizens over the succeeding decade.
About half said yes, a little less than than half were unsure. 2% disagreed.
As of late 2017, the job status was as following:
~20% had any job.
~largely those were low-skilled jobs
Now you have to understand that Germany is a fairly plush welfare state, one that spends a lot of money on its inhabitants. School, medical care, housing, the whole ball of wax. In order to be a net contributor, you have to have a pretty high income. Even higher, if we’re thinking of someone being a net contributor over a lifetime – you have to consider retirement and old-age costs. The occasional gaudy acts of terrorism hardly help: protection is costly. Maybe it boosts GDP like an epidemic of broken windows?
Next, your typical Syrian or Afghani immigrant doesn’t speak German and doesn’t have a lot of human capital: he isn’t a fresh graduate of a German technical high school. If typical of his home country, he has an IQ in the 80s. He finds both beer and blood sausage abhorrent – fitting in is difficult.
The birth rates are very low in Germany and the big companies would like more skilled labor. But after a year, out of a million-some refugees, less than 100 got jobs in those big German companies.
So.. On this not-terribly-difficult, not-terribly rare kind of problem, economists are worse than useless. I could put it more strongly !
Comments:
* I’ve always been mystified by this nonsense, too, but whenever you ask economist like Caplan, Hanson, Cowen, Tabarrok, Easterly, etc, etc. They always come up w/ econometric papers proving immigration to be a net benefit. Anyone at Cato, Reason, Bloomberg. They all think alike. Depressingly to me, I think they are not lying; they rly believe it….
Even IQ realist economist Garrett Jones argues for more immigration. I once read that even Charles Murray believes immigration, whatever kind, is always a good thing.
Economist youngsters like Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman, who are HBD realists, also believe “free labour movements” are a net plus to GDP. Not just Poles and Chinese, Somalis and Syrians too. They will gladly show you papers by open border economists “proving” lowskilled to be a net benefit to GDP.
I never needed immigration-benefits-GDP papers or even IQ research, I can just visit my old neighbourhood and see its sorry state today…
* All of these guys accept the Von Mises argument as an axiom. That is, unless a society has reached maximum population size, more labor makes everyone richer. It’s a basic libertarian argument, that like most of libertarianism, only works in imagination land.
* According to von Mises it was a meaningless question whether immigration benefits the receiving population because he quite explicitly assumes that there is no real difference between populations.
* Von Mises was nuts. By the same logic, when a nation is attacked, it should worry just as much about casualties to the enemy as to its own forces… No country can solve its problems by importing an extra underclass.
* Prof. Heiner Rindermann? Ostracized since he honestly and scientifically answered a question about possible race differences in intelligence in a German radio interview, he is one of a few left psychometricians in Germany. When the migrant crisis hit its peak in autumn 2015, he wrote an article for the journal Focus that formally educated African Academics and engineers most likely would have an IQ around 93 according to his best estimates and numbers. That would just equal the average cognitive ability of graduates of the German Realschule (secondary high school with diploma but no qualification for higher/tertiary studies, normally completed with 16 years). Result: Everyone offended.
* Economists, like almost all academics and servants of the deep state, are mainly interested in their own economic status….Which would be harmed by telling the truth about 3d world immigration….
