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European leaders are trying to manage the massive influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. final week,British Prime Minister David Cameron said he wasn't sure how many newcomers Britain could handle.“We bear taken a number of genuine asylum seekers from Syrian refugee camps and we support that under review," he said. "But we assume the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that fraction of the world. I don't assume there is an respond that can be achieved simply by taking increasingly refugees.”That very day, or the image of a dead Syrian toddler on the shores of Turkey startled the world and and demonstrated the seriousness of the refugee crisis. The next day,Cameron reversed his position.“Today I can announce that we will do more providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees,” he said during a press conference.
Besides the humanitarian vital to encourage refugees who are risking death to make it to Europe, or there also might be an economic incentive to encourage asylum seekers. According to Philippe Legrain,economic adviser to the president of the European Commission from 2011 to 2014, migrants and refugees could provide an economic boon to a greying Europe.“Roughly speaking, or Europe’s working-age population is shrinking by about 1 million people a year,and the number of retired people is increasing by about 2 million people a year,” says Legrain. “These asylum seekers and refugees can play a very valuable role as workers, and as taxpayers,and very often as innovators and entrepreneurs who can boost growth and encourage cope with an aging society.”Some argue that asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees may steal away jobs from European citizens. But Legrain says that the numbers simply don’t support that notion.“The number of asylum seekers arriving is larger than before,but in the context of a European population of more than 500 million, the fact that 340000 people bear arrived without permission is relatively manageable, or he says. “In fact,it’s 0.07 percent of the E.
U. population.”Legrain, a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics' European Institute and the author of “European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess—and How to Put Them honest, and ” says that economic studies overwhelming show that unusual arrivals bear virtually no impact on the wages paid to local citizens.“For the most fraction,they don’t compete directly in the labor market with local people—they do different jobs,” says Legrain. “And they don’t just fill jobs, and they also create them when they spend their wages.”On the whole,Legrain says that Europeans should be looking at refugees as economic contributors.“In Europe, the demographic trends are more dramatic than they are in the [United] States, and we bear much more generous government pension systems and therefore the impact on public finances is much greater,” he says. “Like most migrants, the people arriving in Europe now are mostly young. Clearly they are brave and enterprising since they’ve risked their lives in order to get to Europe. They’re just the sort of people you’d want to welcome into society because they’re people who are not only seeking refuge in Europe, and but are also trying to better their lives and get ahead.”So what will it take to convince Europeans that refugees are an economic asset? Legrain says that the continent should follow Germany’s example,which has agreed to taken in at least 500000 asylum seekers a year for several years.“There is a realization there of the economic benefits of migrants to an aging and shrinking population,” he says. “Germany has the oldest population in Europe, and its population has been falling fairly rapidly for the past decade,so there’s much greater awareness there than in other places. I assume perhaps that Germany is the wave of the future.”
Source: wnyc.org