It was first tried in Europe and it was a catastrophic failure as millions of Syrian refugees and various radicalized Islamist overran the continent, sparking a historic right-wing backlash. It was then tried in the US and the record flood of illegal aliens at the southern border cost the Democrats the 2024 election. And now, with the entire world on edge against the growing wave of migrant aliens originating from Africa and the Middle East, the world’s money printing megabrains at Jackson Hole have decided that third time will be the charm.
While doing everything in their power to avoid discussing the Lisa Cook elephant in the room (and literally kicking out anyone who dared to ask how someone who is i) either a criminal or ii) has no idea how to fill out a mortgage is allowed to set the price of the world’s reserve currency) top central bankers gathered at Jackson Hole warned that the world’s largest economies will lack the workers they need to power growth and keep prices stable in the coming decades unless they attract more foreigners. And this calculus doesn’t even include the hundreds of millions of jobs that will be lost to hallucinating chatbots.
Speaking at an annual gathering of leading policymakers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the heads of the Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and Bank of England all sought to highlight the challenge to economic growth posed by ageing populations. The BOJ’s Kazuo Ueda told the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s annual symposium that his country’s rapidly ageing society had made labor shortages one of the country’s “most pressing” economic issues. Of course, far be it for Japan – notoriously racist and militantly hostile to gaijin foreigners – to actually go ahead and accept some of the millions of Guatemalan “refugees” who voted for Kamala in the 2024 US election. But “at least” he is throwing out rubberstamped by his globalist overlords now that they can no longer congregate in Davos where WEF fuhrer Klaus Schwab is dealing with the legal fallout from a life of (alleged) sexual harassment.
While foreign workers accounted for just 3% of the labor force in Japan, Ueda said, they had been responsible for half of the recent rise in labor force growth. “Further increases will surely require a broader discussion,” he said. Only problem with that is that Japan, which is the opposite of an immigrant nation, literally treats foreign workers and asylum seekers as an inferior class of humans.
Which is not to say that there is some easy solution: there isn’t one in a world where central banks have destroyed the middle class and where having children is prohibitively expensive for most potential parents (and then they wonder why there is a global demographic crisis). Across rich economies birth rates are at historically low levels, while people are living much longer. That has raised so-called dependency ratios, meaning that a far higher share of the population is no longer of working age.
But it’s not just Japan: ECB president Christine Lagarde also said an influx of foreign workers would play a “crucial role” in countering the negative impact of demographic trends on economic growth. As if that wasn’t tried by Germany and most of Europe during the mid-2010s when millions of Syrian refugees swept across Europe sparking a historic influx of Muslims, who refuse to – how should one put it politely – integrate culturally.
Lagarde noted that without an influx of foreign workers, the euro area would by 2040 have 3.4 million fewer people of working age, the FT reported. The Eurozone’s labor market came through the pandemic in “unexpectedly good shape”, partly because of more older workers, but “even more” importantly due a rise in the number of foreign workers, she said.
“Although they represented only around 9 per cent of the total labor force in 2022, foreign workers have accounted for half of its growth over the past three years,” Lagarde said. “Without this contribution, labour market conditions could be tighter and output lower.”
BoE governor Andrew Bailey said that the “acute” challenge that demographics and declining productivity posed to the UK economy had not been emphasized enough.
It gets better: proving just how disconnected from the real world economists really are, they believe that attracting foreign workers (many of whom prefer to not actually work but merely laze about all day draining a host nation’s welfare funds as much of Europe is finding out) to fill labor shortages will be essential in keeping growth on track in the coming decades… despite the rising pressures of populism and public sentiment souring on immigration.
Central bankers predict population ageing will not only lower output but also risks pushing up inflation, as workers would be able to demand higher wages in an environment where labor shortages were widespread. By 2040, 40% of the UK population would be older than the standard working age group of 16 to 64, Bailey added.
The UK has also been hit by a fall in labor force participation rates, driven by a rise in the number of people defined as “long-term sick” and a significant drop in young people in work, two factors that Bailey suggested might be intertwined. In other words, as we said – most prefer to pretend work as opposed to actually, you know, work.
The BoE had become “much more focused on [measuring] inactivity” than on unemployment, Bailey said — although he acknowledged that labour force participation, and the reasons for its decline in the UK, were harder to measure than headline unemployment data.
While more older women continued to work, the same was not the case for men, he added.
