In which Germany demonstrates, again, that mass immigration is not, and has never been, actually good for the economy:
Friedrich Merz’s desperate attempt to appear tough on migration took another blow this week, after it was revealed that close to half the taxpayer cash spent on the Bürgergeld (citizens’ allowance) continues to go to individuals without German citizenship. Figures show that the Federal Employment Agency handed out almost €47 billion in benefits in 2025, and that 46.6% of this went to foreigners.
Right-wing news site NIUS on Wednesday reported that “the massive influx [of migrants] from non-European countries”—especially since 2015—“is increasingly pushing Germany’s social welfare system to its limits.” That is despite German Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil (SPD) insisting last month that “the migration of recent years has significantly stabilised the German social security system—even if some give the impression that the opposite is true.”
Payments cover basic income support, as well as housing and heating costs.
The devil, as always, is revealed in the contradiction between the theory and the subsequent numbers. The idea that immigration boosts the economy is trivially true because it is a tautology dependent upon a definition of the economy as something measured by Gross Domestic Product.
C + I + G = GDP.
So, if you allow 10 immigrants and the government gives them money to spend, both C (consumer spending) and G (government spending) automatically go up. It’s financed by increasing the debt. The economy “grows” and the immigration is “good for the economy”. This is true whether there is one immigrant or one billion; if economists actually believed their own nonsense, then they would advocate for encouraging the entirety of India to immigrate.
And yes, it’s just possible that Canadian economists are actually that dumb, which would explain a lot about the current state of Canada.
The problem is that because immigrants primarily consume and do not produce anything except crime – the service industries in which the employed minority predominantly work is, by definition, not productive – they observably, inevitably, and structurally weaken the economy. As the sclerotic economies of all the countries that immigration has theoretically enhanced are now beginning to show.
All that mass immigration has really accomplished in economic terms is provide new debtors, thereby allowing the banks to remain pseudo-solvent for an additional decade or two. But not only has it not solved any problems, it has significantly exacerbated the existing ones.
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