The burden of immigration: after all, who pays the bill?

We've been ideologically discussing immigration for months. It seems that—as with all issues in 2025—half the country is on the left, advocating for more immigrants and their contributions (ignoring their costs), while the other half blames them for all the country's problems (ignoring their positive effects). So, who's right?

The European Commission report , published by the Joint Research Centre, shatters the myths of the romantic left and the populist right. Let's look at the facts.

This study assessed the net fiscal contribution – the difference between taxes paid and benefits received – among 3 groups: natives, intra-EU migrants (born in another EU country) and extra-EU migrants (born in a country outside the EU).

Based on the EUROMOD and CEPAM-MIC econometric models, the study offers a rigorous and disturbing portrait: the fiscal sustainability of European states is at stake, and immigrants play an ambiguous but crucial role.

Today, EU citizens are net contributors, meaning they pay more in taxes than they receive. However, by 2035, this trend will reverse. Due to demographic aging, these contributors will become net beneficiaries (pensions and benefits), with an average negative balance.

In the future, migrants from intra-EU countries will remain net contributors, while those from outside the EU will also become beneficiaries, albeit to a lesser extent (ageing of this population).

Contrary to simplistic solutions, the study clarifies that simply accepting more migrants is not enough, as increasing the flow alone generates only marginal fiscal gains and entails significant expenses. Only full integration (understood as access to the labor market under conditions equivalent to those of natives) allows for significant gains. With full labor integration, we can ensure that an extra-EU migrant can contribute roughly the same as a native.

We now know that if nothing is done to reverse this "geringonça- style " immigration, we will only see small fiscal gains from immigration, but a significant increase in costs, as these people use national services and infrastructure and will receive pensions in the future.

But why do non-EU migrants contribute less? The reason is that they face longer-term unemployment (especially immediately after arrival) and suffer from lower employment rates due to taking on more precarious, informal, or low-wage jobs, thus reducing their tax payments while using existing infrastructure, such as the NHS.

These individuals generally lack proficiency in the local language (with the exception of Brazilians and Portuguese-speaking Africans in Portugal, whose adaptation is much easier than that of other migrants), which severely limits their access to skilled jobs. They also have difficulty having training obtained outside the EU recognized by EU countries. As a result, they often end up working below their qualifications, reducing productivity and wages.

In some cases, there is also community isolation or resistance to assimilation due to culture and/or religion, which makes full integration into society difficult, but this situation has regional variations and should not be generalized, depending on how the host country structures integration.

It was therefore concluded that extra-EU migrants contribute less because the system integrates them poorly, not because they are inherently less productive or less desirable.

Age and educational level are equally important. Immigrants who arrive at working age and tend to balance the fiscal burden of aging are naturally more important than older people. Intra-EU migrants have, on average, higher educational levels and better labor market indicators than non-EU migrants, and their fiscal success is thus associated with full integration into the labor market.

The mass deportation narrative promoted by populist parties is politically seductive, but economically ruinous and logistically impractical. The costs of deporting hundreds of thousands of people, coupled with legal processes (I assume we don't want to abandon the rule of law that we are), logistical, diplomatic, and social, would far outweigh its alleged economic benefits.

Furthermore, deporting a young person of working age is wasting a potential taxpayer. Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, it makes more sense to invest in their education, language learning, and job integration than to abandon this workforce.

The Socialist Party in Portugal and part of the European left failed to believe that welcoming would be enough to integrate. Integration requires strategy, investment, and demand. The answer cannot be a fear-driven border closure, just as we cannot accept an unlimited number of people. We cannot be naively welcoming, but neither can we adopt xenophobia as a solution to our problems.

What society needs is pragmatism and understanding that we cannot assume that immigration is the solution to all birth rate problems under the assumption that migrants do not age and when they do, we continue to receive people of working age to feed the cycle.

The coming years will be years of radical changes in the labor market, digitalization, and especially automation. The human worker will be increasingly less necessary, and societies must plan for the future, not just live for the next five years. Portugal needs a certain number of migrants, yes, but fully integrated ones, as well as active birth policies such as lifetime income tax exemption for families with more than three children, housing and daycare support (where available), extended parental and maternity leave, and funding for in vitro fertilization.

We can and must welcome others without losing our culture. Language, history, and traditions are strengthened when shared, not when pushed into ideological trenches for political gain.

The big question isn't "immigration: yes or no?", but rather "what kind of immigration and how to integrate it?" Immigration is only part of the solution to the demographic problem, as the majority of residents will always be net beneficiaries. The real challenge is the aging of the working population before an era in which robotization becomes commonplace. There's nothing wrong with having a country of 6 million people with a good quality of life and robotic production sectors, but we're simply not in that era yet.

The numbers don't lie, but political discourse often does: significant fiscal gains only occur when migrants participate in the labor market at the same level as natives. Only effective, fair, humane, demanding, and strategic integration can ensure fiscal sustainability and social cohesion.

It is essential not to demonize them, but to give greater attention to the selection and qualification of migrants, assuming immigration as a new centrality, but without invalidating the need for structural reforms in welfare systems and birth rate incentive policies. Arbitrary and ideological cuts to immigration will save little and cost dearly in the long run, but investing in full integration is a guaranteed return.