Extend and Pretend for Migrants By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
The European Union’s plan for immigration is as nonexistent as its plan for debt.
In the immediate refugee crisis many Europeans are acting on their humanitarian instincts, and that’s laudable. Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader, has been beatified for spontaneously throwing open her country’s doors to an estimated 800,000 Middle Eastern immigrants.
But Ms. Merkel has been busy for five years trying to save the eurozone by throwing extend-and-pretend money at Greece and other countries. She knew these loans weren’t a solution for Europe’s debt and stagnation problems; they were meant to stop the European Union from blowing up in the meantime. Her refugee policy is also partly a case of extend-and-pretend. Germany stepped up to forestall an outbreak of defiance of the EU’s open-borders mandate by front-line European states, triggering a crisis of Brussels’s authority.
Though it may be a humanitarian necessity too, her immigration initiative amounts to yet another time-buying exercise for a European unity project that seems more troubled by the day.
By now, if you’re of an academic bent, you’re recalling the “social trust” literature. It doesn’t promise well for this experiment.
ENLARGE High levels of social trust, according to this literature, are what make Europe’s extensive welfare states possible, beginning with its model form, in Scandinavia. Citizens pay more than half their incomes in taxes because they value the government services they get, and because they believe others are paying too and not cheating to receive benefits they don’t need.
“We’ve always had a great trust in other people in Scandinavia, and this trust is the cornerstone of our welfare state,” explained one of the leading “trust” researchers, Christian Bjørnskov of Denmark’s Aarhus University, to the publication ScienceNordic three years ago.
Less felicitously, he added: “The welfare state would collapse in a country like Greece, where distrust and corruption are widespread. It’s a very human reaction to take as much as you can if you feel that others are doing the same.”
A mischievous addition to this literature is a 2001 Harvard paper by economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote suggesting that “racial animosity” by a majority of voters explains why the U.S. hasn’t adopted a European-style welfare state. But any society as dynamic, multicultural and multiethnic as the U.S. would be unlikely to generate the requisite social trust, so rounding it down to American racism is a bit of a cheap shot.
More worrisome might be a 2014 survey by French economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc and Marc Sangnier. Voter support for an extensive welfare state—which is not the same as saying it will be democratically sustainable in the long run—is actually “twin peaked,” the authors tell us.
By “twin peaked,” they mean supported by civic-minded voters who exhibit high trust, but also by “untrustworthy individuals . . . because they expect to benefit without bearing the costs.”
To counter our gloom comes Thomas Piketty, the instant sage of the left after he published a book last year decrying the political influence of the rich. He now says a flood of energetic immigrants is just the medicine Europe’s stagnant economies need.
But to benefit, these countries would have to become favorable to growth again. If European capitals aren’t willing to reform their domestic economies to bring relief to their own taxpayers and armies of youthful unemployed, why would they do so to accommodate a deluge of uninvited strangers? They wouldn’t.
In July, Denmark elected a government pledged to cut benefits and family rights for immigrants; now the Danish government is advertising its immigrant-unfriendly policies in Lebanese newspapers to discourage migrants.
A poll last month finds the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats Party is now that country’s biggest. In Norway and Finland, where immigration has been surging, so too has the influence of populist parties campaigning against “welfare tourism” and an Islamicization of Europe.
And these are the nicey-nice trusting peoples of Scandinavia. Never mind the already powerful anti-immigrant sentiments loose in France and Germany.
It would be pleasant to think that Europeans, following the logic of their humanitarian impulse, would now overhaul their economies to accommodate job seekers and entrepreneurs from the Middle East, and welcome, by the way, the creative destruction that would befall every vested and uncompetitive interest in their domestic economies.
That would be quite a reversal of a long-run trend. The disease (to use a possibly inapt metaphor) started in Europe with the sclerosis of the 1970s, spread to Japan, now entering its third “lost decade,” and has come to the U.S. with the anemic post-2008 recovery.
Though hope is always a comfort, throwing a destabilizing immigration crisis into Europe’s mix right now does not seem a formula for good outcomes.
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