"Overall, the report reveals the staggering costs of migration to the Netherlands as a whole. Netherlands would have been much better off had they restricted migration to nobody at all."
Yes, that is the bottom line. And it is true of all European countries that allow non-Western immigration.
I did not see figures for the cost of increased crime, both economic and personal.
I think the direct cost of crime is included, as in costs to police, courts, and prisons, but not the higher order costs, such as insurance premiums, loss of freedom, moving away to safety (longer commutes), dysfunctional democracy and so on.
"These costs have been allocated to the first generation and are largely attributed to non-Western immigrants. The sub-item security (police, justice and crime) also falls under public administration. The costs of security are much higher for people with an immigrationbackground because the number of suspects per 10,000 inhabitants is higher for all age groups than for native Dutch people."
My first thought was the Chinese-Indonesians may be skewering the data. Some Chinese, who feared being targeted by the new regime, fled Indonesia for other Asian countries or the Netherlands. But, according to Wikipedia, only ~5000 or 2% of the post-independent Indonesian migration was ethnically Chinese.
I’d love to read a Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania response to this. They are insistent all migration is good migration. Maybe they think the Dutch experience doesn’t apply to the US.
Sadly, Emil, this may be incomplete. Dutch society invests a significant amount of money in health, food, and education before producing a worker. Let's say an engineering degree from the Third World is only equivalent to Dutch vocational training - that's still 20-something years of expenditure saved. Calculate this investment, and you might find that many immigrants at least break even.
Additionally, there is a nefarious motivation to neuter developing economies by draining their human resources, preventing them from competing in some capacity in the future. Moreover, there is an unquantifiable value in interfering with competing cultural systems: Afghanistan is no threat to our liberal, gynocentric democracy if the Afghan diaspora dances in discos while the population at home watches and thinks they can and perhaps should experience the same.
That is still incomplete. We also need to account for the increased security costs and prison costs imposed by bad immigrants who, for example, drive vehicles through Christmas markets or attack visiting football fans. How big a cost is the security theatre to which travellers or attendees of public events are subjected now?
And we need to account for the general loss of social trust caused by immigrants who refuse to integrate, and the costs imposed on local women by harassment from male immigrants whose culture does not permit women to be in public unchaperoned. The Afghan and other muslim diasporas include people who wish to impose much greater costs on western societies, and do so with increasing frequency and scale.
The boundary has to be drawn somewhere. It's reasonable to draw it where this study has drawn it.
Unfortunately, Islamic terrorism impacts the West far less than Western liberalisation impacts Islam. The system will hence continue with its immigration practices as culture war.
Arguments based on the Social fabric are, likewise, tricky to keep. The culture wars shift Western culture so hard to the left that many parts of the far right today would be progressive subversives to the cultural fabric of, say, 1925. Women harrassed? We white knight for free relationships outside marriage and for people getting to know each other without their families consent because, 1968 is a firm part of Western culture. It smashed the Norman Rockwell West out of being. That in turn was a materialistic, vain and areligious iteration of what was before it. Let us not forget that all hell breaks loose if you suggest society should be built as an austere hierarchy in place of a hedonic, liberalist democracy. The right cannot deal with that, hierarchy died in 1918 or 1776, depending on where you live. Austerity died with the renaissance. Before that, we had 800 years of the plague, if the system is to be believed. So don't go there... https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2210114-webcomics
With economic arguments we will have to see what the real costs are. If it costs around 250.000€ to raise a child to 18 years, even if they become a janitor, then the immigrants will be a bargain to the system. Hence the system will continue even if the overhead costs are slightly larger due to policing. And the system is more ruthless than to feel sorry for the 3rd world countries it depletes. 2/3(!) of Ghanan medical doctors live in either London or New York alone. Tell me with a straight face that the system cares.
Should you be able to argue economically against open borders, the system will just import higher-skilled immigrants. With them IQ supremacy is a difficult position to hold, because as Emil demonstrated with educated Indian immigrants to the US, they in particular regress to the mean of 106, not 75. Pajeet does what Pablo couldn't, that is, discriminate against you at the highest strata. Meanwhile India becomes more of a mess because Pajeet was the Brahmin keeping the country minimally functional. A far cry from global eugenics but how do you want to argue for eugenics and women roaming the street unchaperoned simultaneously? We come full circle and it makes anti-immigrant IQ supremacy (and by extension modern national socialism) look like a gynocentric fertility cult.
This study being taken up by the conservatives as a clear call for racist immigrant policies is silly. All this article proves is that if there is no racism found within the Dutch schooling system (which there isn't) and if there is a gap in economic opportunity for immigrants (which there is thanks to a plethora of biases against immigrants in Europe); then we can clearly note that the fiscal costs come from a lack in social and political inclusion, rather than "iMiGrAnTs ArE DuMb."
Take America; Immigrants have very clearly added to the fiscal budget rahter than taken away from it:
Orrenius, Pia M. “New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Working Papers, vol. 2017, no. 1704, 2017, https://doi.org/10.24149/wp1704.
Why? Because America's economy is growing and constantly creating new opportunities, wheras europe isnt. The netherlands GDP fell DRAMATICALLY from 2008 and didnt recover until 2018. What that means is that there were simply no new jobs created. And guess what? If there are no new jobs then there is no opportunity to grow.
I will concede that the europe was silly to onload that many immigrants; not because of their skin color but rather there were no economic opportunities available.
I’m amazed that the study immigrants have such a poor return. At least in the United States, international students usually end up paying far more than domestic students for college (no easy scholarships, no government aid) which essentially acts as a subsidy for everyone else. They usually don’t work during school (meaning a remittance from their relatives back home), and after graduation, they return home after essentially paying top-dollar for education. I don’t see how that could possibly be a drain on resources.
And for those who stay in the US, they usually end up either working for less money, or working harder than the mean for the job they get, mostly because of the restrictions placed on them by the OPT/H1-B system that makes their position as an employee more precarious than the average citizen, meaning they are incentivized to overdeliver value (either by being underpaid or overworked) in ways Americans are not.
I am curious what’s different in the Netherlands, or what the specific methodology is that seems to clash with my anecdotal experience.
Good article, some aspects difficult to quantify but let's take this analysis as a good approximation. Based on the graph stratified by background, does that mean that the economy is held together by brain-draining 20-50 years old Western migrants? Even the Dutch reference population below 10 years of age seems to go negative across the lifetime.
Thanks for another excellent article.
"Overall, the report reveals the staggering costs of migration to the Netherlands as a whole. Netherlands would have been much better off had they restricted migration to nobody at all."
Yes, that is the bottom line. And it is true of all European countries that allow non-Western immigration.
I did not see figures for the cost of increased crime, both economic and personal.
I think the direct cost of crime is included, as in costs to police, courts, and prisons, but not the higher order costs, such as insurance premiums, loss of freedom, moving away to safety (longer commutes), dysfunctional democracy and so on.
"These costs have been allocated to the first generation and are largely attributed to non-Western immigrants. The sub-item security (police, justice and crime) also falls under public administration. The costs of security are much higher for people with an immigrationbackground because the number of suspects per 10,000 inhabitants is higher for all age groups than for native Dutch people."
Thanks.
I don't know about nowadays, but in the past, most people migrating from Indonesia to Netherlands were mixed-dutch people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo_people
My first thought was the Chinese-Indonesians may be skewering the data. Some Chinese, who feared being targeted by the new regime, fled Indonesia for other Asian countries or the Netherlands. But, according to Wikipedia, only ~5000 or 2% of the post-independent Indonesian migration was ethnically Chinese.
Another great article!
However, by the time I got to the end I couldn't shake this feeling. I just read an 8 page article where the author said water is wet.
Of course the non-western immigrants are net negative to society.
It seems that Western immigration policy is confronting significant reevaluation across the board.
The accounting has started, and the hard questions are mounting.
I’d love to read a Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania response to this. They are insistent all migration is good migration. Maybe they think the Dutch experience doesn’t apply to the US.
Sadly, Emil, this may be incomplete. Dutch society invests a significant amount of money in health, food, and education before producing a worker. Let's say an engineering degree from the Third World is only equivalent to Dutch vocational training - that's still 20-something years of expenditure saved. Calculate this investment, and you might find that many immigrants at least break even.
Additionally, there is a nefarious motivation to neuter developing economies by draining their human resources, preventing them from competing in some capacity in the future. Moreover, there is an unquantifiable value in interfering with competing cultural systems: Afghanistan is no threat to our liberal, gynocentric democracy if the Afghan diaspora dances in discos while the population at home watches and thinks they can and perhaps should experience the same.
That is still incomplete. We also need to account for the increased security costs and prison costs imposed by bad immigrants who, for example, drive vehicles through Christmas markets or attack visiting football fans. How big a cost is the security theatre to which travellers or attendees of public events are subjected now?
And we need to account for the general loss of social trust caused by immigrants who refuse to integrate, and the costs imposed on local women by harassment from male immigrants whose culture does not permit women to be in public unchaperoned. The Afghan and other muslim diasporas include people who wish to impose much greater costs on western societies, and do so with increasing frequency and scale.
The boundary has to be drawn somewhere. It's reasonable to draw it where this study has drawn it.
Unfortunately, Islamic terrorism impacts the West far less than Western liberalisation impacts Islam. The system will hence continue with its immigration practices as culture war.
Arguments based on the Social fabric are, likewise, tricky to keep. The culture wars shift Western culture so hard to the left that many parts of the far right today would be progressive subversives to the cultural fabric of, say, 1925. Women harrassed? We white knight for free relationships outside marriage and for people getting to know each other without their families consent because, 1968 is a firm part of Western culture. It smashed the Norman Rockwell West out of being. That in turn was a materialistic, vain and areligious iteration of what was before it. Let us not forget that all hell breaks loose if you suggest society should be built as an austere hierarchy in place of a hedonic, liberalist democracy. The right cannot deal with that, hierarchy died in 1918 or 1776, depending on where you live. Austerity died with the renaissance. Before that, we had 800 years of the plague, if the system is to be believed. So don't go there... https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2210114-webcomics
With economic arguments we will have to see what the real costs are. If it costs around 250.000€ to raise a child to 18 years, even if they become a janitor, then the immigrants will be a bargain to the system. Hence the system will continue even if the overhead costs are slightly larger due to policing. And the system is more ruthless than to feel sorry for the 3rd world countries it depletes. 2/3(!) of Ghanan medical doctors live in either London or New York alone. Tell me with a straight face that the system cares.
Should you be able to argue economically against open borders, the system will just import higher-skilled immigrants. With them IQ supremacy is a difficult position to hold, because as Emil demonstrated with educated Indian immigrants to the US, they in particular regress to the mean of 106, not 75. Pajeet does what Pablo couldn't, that is, discriminate against you at the highest strata. Meanwhile India becomes more of a mess because Pajeet was the Brahmin keeping the country minimally functional. A far cry from global eugenics but how do you want to argue for eugenics and women roaming the street unchaperoned simultaneously? We come full circle and it makes anti-immigrant IQ supremacy (and by extension modern national socialism) look like a gynocentric fertility cult.
tl;dr overton window
This study being taken up by the conservatives as a clear call for racist immigrant policies is silly. All this article proves is that if there is no racism found within the Dutch schooling system (which there isn't) and if there is a gap in economic opportunity for immigrants (which there is thanks to a plethora of biases against immigrants in Europe); then we can clearly note that the fiscal costs come from a lack in social and political inclusion, rather than "iMiGrAnTs ArE DuMb."
Take America; Immigrants have very clearly added to the fiscal budget rahter than taken away from it:
Martino, Daniel. “The Lifetime Fiscal Impact of Immigrants.” Manhattan Institute, 18 Sept. 2024, manhattan.institute/article/the-lifetime-fiscal-impact-of-immigrants.
Orrenius, Pia M. “New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Working Papers, vol. 2017, no. 1704, 2017, https://doi.org/10.24149/wp1704.
Why? Because America's economy is growing and constantly creating new opportunities, wheras europe isnt. The netherlands GDP fell DRAMATICALLY from 2008 and didnt recover until 2018. What that means is that there were simply no new jobs created. And guess what? If there are no new jobs then there is no opportunity to grow.
I will concede that the europe was silly to onload that many immigrants; not because of their skin color but rather there were no economic opportunities available.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=NL
Why is critical thinking so hard for the right?
I’m amazed that the study immigrants have such a poor return. At least in the United States, international students usually end up paying far more than domestic students for college (no easy scholarships, no government aid) which essentially acts as a subsidy for everyone else. They usually don’t work during school (meaning a remittance from their relatives back home), and after graduation, they return home after essentially paying top-dollar for education. I don’t see how that could possibly be a drain on resources.
And for those who stay in the US, they usually end up either working for less money, or working harder than the mean for the job they get, mostly because of the restrictions placed on them by the OPT/H1-B system that makes their position as an employee more precarious than the average citizen, meaning they are incentivized to overdeliver value (either by being underpaid or overworked) in ways Americans are not.
I am curious what’s different in the Netherlands, or what the specific methodology is that seems to clash with my anecdotal experience.
Indians do relatively OK, no? A bit worse than the Dutch, but not as bad as the Muslim world.
Good article, some aspects difficult to quantify but let's take this analysis as a good approximation. Based on the graph stratified by background, does that mean that the economy is held together by brain-draining 20-50 years old Western migrants? Even the Dutch reference population below 10 years of age seems to go negative across the lifetime.
Education requirements just turn in diploma mills.
Even job requirements can be gamed.
Either you cut it all off or you charge a very high per year fee to maintain a visa, such that nobody would do it for anything but high end labor.
I thought that the graphique showed that students were net positive as long as they arrived before 50, did I misread?
I was given an IQ test by someone from the Netherlands and ran into exactly that. There aren't enough questions at the top end.