🚷 🇳🇱 📊 Die Welt has an interview with a co-author of the groundbreaking Dutch study on the net economic costs of immigration, which has sparked a huge controversy in the Netherlands. The top line finding is that immigration has cost

🔶️ the Dutch state an average of €17 billion per year since 1995, mainly in providing generous welfare benefits to unemployed migrants. Work migrants from Western (blue) & non-Western (black) are the only net contributors. Asylum seekers are the biggest net drain.

🔶️ The other finding is that migrants who don't integrate into the labor market stay in the Netherlands the longest, along with migrants who arrive for family reunification. Immigrants who adapt successfully tend to take their skills and leave the Netherlands,

🔶️ often heading to the US or UK where salaries are higher and taxes lower. Study co-author Jan H. van de Beek describes the system as a sort of welfare magnet in which the least-integrated immigrants stay the longest and cost Dutch taxpayers the most.

🔶️ The University of Amsterdam, which employs some of the study's authors and helped finance it, has since distanced itself from the study, since pointing to any downsides of immigration, no matter obvious and empirically demonstrable, is still taboo among mainstream circles.

🔶️ This, of course, is part of what drives European voters to populist-right parties -- the disconnect between what they see and experience every day and the airbrushed world within the "opinion corridor" (to use the Swedish term) of opinions deemed socially acceptable.

🔶️ Given what we know about immigration in Germany, the results of a major study like the Dutch one would yield nearly identical results here. Which is why it will very likely never happen. The objective reality of the effects of German immigration policy would be too disturbing.

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/plus249243192/Migration-Einwanderer-die-von-Sozialleistungen-abhaengig-werden-verlassen-das-Land-nicht.html

📎 Andrew Hammel