Allowing More Immigration of Refugees Would Be Good Both for Refugees and for the Economies They Come To

 "Allowing more immigration of refugees would be good both for refugees and for the economies they come to."

Immigration of refugees is seen by some as a humanitarian crisis and others as a challenge and a threat. And then there are the economists! Economists tend to see a large influx of refugees not as an obligation or a threat — but as an opportunity. Over the past two years immigration into Europe has increased significantly partially due to the Syria’s civil war and different reasons such as economic migration in which people moving to find work or follow a particular career path, social migration. The question is if the countries of refugees are secure for them, why will they need to escape from their homes and risk their lives to go and live in another country? According to my research, within a period of 10 days, there have been 1200 people drowned in the Mediterranean. An unknown number were refugees from Syria, Eritrea and Somalia fleeing war or persecution. They perished in part because the EU’s policy on asylum is a moral and political failure. These following reasons will support my essay.

Economics

Across the European Union many countries have accepted refugees to come and live and work. However, it is clear that Germany has accepted the highest proportion of the asylum claims in the last year with over 500,000 people.

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Through immigration Germany has increased its labour force market thus creating more jobs available for them. In 2013, a total of 429,000 people came into Germany than actually left which was nearly 0.5% of the refugees. Consequently, it has resulted in a substantial increase in overall employment and hence GDP, which increased government revenue. It can be concluded from the bar chart that there was a significant increase in the rate of GDP in Jan 2014, which was from 1.2 to 2.6. The percentage increase was 1.4%. Thus, the multiplier effect has worked hence 0.5% of injection to the economy causes 1.4% increase of GDP. Although the German’s government will have to spend more money to support their refugees in the short term due to housing and education, its budget surplus size can actually increase. According to the research, the German budget surplus will rise from 0.3% of GDP to 0.6% of GDP in 2015. Specifically, to explain this, the researcher (Mark Schieritz) said that the extra money spending does not damage the economy performance, but it’s helping to stimulate the demand of people through entering the labour market. [pic 2]

As a result, I believe that this can improve the standard of living for people as the government can spend more of their revenues on healthcare services, infrastructure, and roads. Additionally, the working age in Germany is shrinking. There are currently close to 46 million people of working age in Germany, who are theoretically capable of working. Without immigration, that number will decline to less than 29 million in about 30 years. That would represent a decline of 36%. Even if the retirement age were raised to 70 and the number of women and men in the workforce were equal, the total workforce would only increase by 4.4 million people.  

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