Globalist Think Tank: German Economy Is Struggling Because of Germans Calling for Less Immigration

The populist right may not having power in Germany yet but it is certainly their fault that the economy is underperforming, a top globalist thinktank says, blaming them for anti-immigration rhetoric it says is killing economic growth.

The old neoliberal orthodoxy that immigration equals economic growth may be dead and buried in the minds of many, but it still lives on in the hearts of think-tankers like the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), which blames insufficient migrants for Germany’s gloomy economic forecast.

The IfW, which works under the jaunty motto ‘Understanding and Shaping Globalization’, slashed its expectation for growth in 2025, saying unemployment was likely to rise while manufacturing and construction drifts “deeper into recessionary territory”.

While actual political leaders come in for some criticism, with the German central government not spending enough money and the European Central Bank’s interest rate decisions being cited, German media was quick to pick up on the IfW also blaming people talking about border control.

Moritz Schularick, President of the Institute said: “The German economy is increasingly facing a crisis that is not only cyclical but also structural in nature… the asylum debate is poisoning the dialog about the economic need to attract skilled workers from abroad. As long as this remains the case, we can watch our growth opportunities dwindle”.

That immigration is a fundamental ingredient for economic growth has been Western dogma for decades, with practically all discussion of the possibility of border control ultimately ending with governments refusing to budge because they believe border controls would crash the economy. Yet cracks are finally starting to appear in this belief, with a report earlier this year looking at the British experiencing noting that, shockingly, record levels of immigration did not in fact correlate with increased in GDP per capita.

As reported at the time:

According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), while the United Kingdom’s GDP grew by 0.1 per cent last year — amid record levels of immigration — GDP per person fell by 0.8 per cent, drastically behind the G7 average of 1.2 per cent, despite the UK seeing the second-highest level of population growth, which has largely been driven by mass migration… The CPS report remarked: “If large-scale migration of the sort we’ve seen is really so great for the economy, we have to ask ourselves why we are not seeing this in the GDP per capita data”.

… The report found that of the net two million migrants who came to the UK from non-EU nations over the past five years, just 15 per cent arrived in the country with the principal aim of working.

The report also found that the rush to import people from around the world has come with an economic cost. Migrants from Spain, for example, earn 40 per cent more on average than migrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Meanwhile, migrants from the Middle East, North Africa or Turkey between the ages of 25 to 64 were nearly twice as likely to be ‘economically inactive’ than native-born Britons.