Howard W. French
This time of year, the days in Ferrara, a slightly out-of-the-way medieval castle town in northern Italy that I visited in late September, have a charming monotony to them.
In the warmth of early fall mornings, tourists from other parts of Italy as well as further afield in Europe circle around the 14th-century castle’s moat and drawbridges or wander inside for the baronial view from there. On the main street nearby, where cars are banned, crowds file past a towering statue of the ascetic friar Jerome Savonarola. Judging from the conversations I could overhear, the pedestrian traffic was mostly made up of Italians.
There was one feature of this movement above all that caught my attention, though, and it is a good thing that it did: Weaving their way through the flow of shoppers and gawkers were well-dressed people on clanky bicycles, gliding through the crowds with a speed and self-assurance that suggested it was other people’s duty to get out of their way.
These are not, I promise, idle observations. Nor is this an essay about tourism or regional life in Italy. The distinguishing feature of the locals, and especially of the brazen cyclists, was their advanced average age, which I pegged at late 50s or early 60s. I could not, of course, poll these crowds, but as I observed them day after day, what demographers have been writing about Italy and certain other parts of Europe became obvious: This is a rapidly aging society where children, and hence young people, are becoming increasingly scarce. In 2022, Italian childbirths hit a record low, having declined for the 14th consecutive year. Nationally, more than 12 people died for every seven who were born.
On my second day in Ferrara, I had lunch with two Italian radio journalists, both well into their careers. Without any prompting from me, their conversation moved quickly and ineluctably to the topics of aging and childlessness. As I was to learn, these subjects have an unavoidable force, like gravity, as population dynamics here and in much of Europe shift in dramatic and, for many, deeply ominous ways.
My lunch hosts and numerous other Italian interlocutors spoke constantly of the rising retirement age here and fears that the present statutory threshold for this, 67—already among the world’s highest—would continue to rise. Soon, they bemoaned, Italians may need to work until they are 70 or even older in order to pay for national retirement and health insurance schemes that are under pressure from the dearth of young workers. Meanwhile, many told me, the country is having trouble generating new jobs for what relatively few young people there are. People who do get hired cling to their jobs out of a lack of options. Job mobility, and hence social mobility, they say, are in decline.
In light of all of this, it seemed strange to me, at least in logical terms, that just days before I arrived here, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni upbraided Germany for funding humanitarian work aimed at rescuing migrants attempting to enter Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
Meloni’s objection to such funding is so morally and ethically deplorable to me that I won’t discuss that aspect here. But I do want to examine the prevailing narrative that is driving this kind of anti-immigration sentiment: the idea that Italy and Europe more broadly are experiencing a migration crisis. It is true that migration numbers have gone up. So far in 2023, Italy has received more than 130,000 migrants via the Mediterranean Sea, compared to nearly 70,000 for all of last year—meaning that the year-on-year rate will almost certainly have doubled before the start of 2024.
The question, though, is whether this is really a crisis—or if, instead, it is a matter of Italy and Europe failing to properly appraise the opportunities and risks of increased migration.
I had traveled to Ferrara to participate in the Internazionale, one of Europe’s great literary festivals, and in addition to a talk about my most recent book, the organizers asked me to give a second talk on the topic of Africa’s rapidly growing population and its booming cities, which I have written about previously.
I used this second occasion to challenge a large auditorium full of people to rethink their fears of aging and decay in light of Africa’s demographic changes, and to use this reflection as a way to overcome the right-wing populism and xenophobia sweeping much of Europe. I wanted them to understand the issues of race and identity that are preventing them from seeing young Africa as the opportunity and advantage that it is.
Admittedly, this is a long shot. Europeans are about to be faced with a stark and, for many, uncomfortable choice, one for which long-standing notions of identity and prejudice may impede rational self-interest. They can cling to a bygone, dusty view of Europe as a place proper to white people, even as it continues to hollow out. Or they can recenter Africa in their worldview out of an understanding that, for the remainder of this century at least, the continent that all but brushes up against Europe’s shores and has long been an integral but unacknowledged part of its history is destined to be the overwhelming source of young and working-aged people on the planet.
Under almost any realistic scenario, the identity-driven view of what it means to be European, one centered on skin color and what scientists call phenotype, is bound to hurt the people who live here. Two decades from now, if not much sooner, Europeans who thought there was a refugee crisis at present and responded by trying to build higher and higher walls, both real and virtual, to stop immigration will realize that by the standards of the near future, immigration from Africa hadn’t really even begun yet. That is because Africa will go from twice the population of Europe to three times and then four and possibly five times over the remaining course of this century.
To be sure, quaint and small Ferrara isn’t a perfect surrogate for all of Italy, but I encountered few Africans during my stay. Women from Nigeria and Cameroon cleaned the rooms in my hotel and spoke to me in good Italian, despite the fact that neither of their countries of origin use that language. I encountered another West African man unloading heavy freight from a truck. And on one small piazza, I chatted with four men in their 20s from Senegal and Mali who were all in search of work.
What do Italy and Europe do in the near future when they no longer have teachers and priests with local ancestry? Churches may close, but schools? One in five Europeans is 65 or older at present. By 2050, that number will approach 30 percent. And on present trends, the graying of Europe will continue apace far beyond this level. Who needs foreign, never mind African, teachers if schools don’t have many European students, one might object? But that only lays bare another aspect of Europe’s looming crisis and the opportunity Africa presents.
Spain’s minister responsible for migration, speaking this week at the launch of a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on international migration trends, said that Europe will require 50 million new migrants over the next 25 years just to stabilize its population near present levels.
Europe will need immigrants from nontraditional sources because it will need students in order to have workers and consumers in the future. It will need students to become researchers and engineers and scientists and professionals—not just menial workers like the women who cleaned my hotel room, without whom Europe is already increasingly unable to function. Africans will have to play a big and fast-growing role in this equation.
Immigration on a far larger scale than anything yet seen is the only thing that can prevent Europe from becoming an empty amusement park filled with cathedrals, forts, palaces, and other celebrated cultural relics from a grand but fast-receding past. To achieve this, though, Europe will have to get over the all-too-easy-to-sell delusions of right-wing extremist or populist politicians who promote the notion that closing the continent’s gates and policing its borders can save it from difficult change.
And Europeans are not the only ones who will look back at today’s immigration numbers and recognize that they paled in comparison to the vastly larger norms of the future. In the United States, the Biden administration just recently reversed its long-held objection to building a border wall with Mexico, an idea ceaselessly promoted by former President Donald Trump. Such measures are best seen as a pre-electoral sop to those who presently oppose immigration. They will not hold back the coming numbers of people, though. As fertility rates fall and the society ages, the United States, like Europe, will be forced to accept that large-scale immigration is key to paying for the old of today and to future prosperity.
In fact, as more and more societies age rapidly across the globe and young people become scarcer, the second half of this century will see a competition among relatively rich countries to attract young people from poorer parts of the world.
A question from someone in the audience at my Ferrara talk asked me: What about China? Why doesn’t it have to learn to accept immigration as a remedy for aging and low fertility? Recently surpassed by India as the world’s most populous country, China’s population will shrink with breathtaking speed over the remainder of this century, falling to roughly half of its present level. The Chinese government is increasingly letting on to its rising state of alarm over this. Almost no one can imagine China opening itself up to become an immigration society, though. It has little tradition of in-migration and little experience with wide cultural or geographic heterogeneity. In most of the world, rightly or wrongly, its language, and especially its writing system, is considered too difficult to learn. Its political system of strict authoritarianism and control also turns more people off than it attracts.
Just think how fortunate you Europeans are, I told my audience. Almost every African country has a European language as an official tongue. At the level of popular culture, from TV to soccer to news and information and school curricula, Africa is deeply penetrated by European ideas. So deeply penetrated that Africans are the opposite of cultural aliens, if you can only get over your old-fashioned ideas of yourself, which are seated in skin color and old wealth. Best of all, Africans want to come to Europe—not to sit around and collect dole, but to work hard in a place that before long will be desperate for workers.
Nothing will stop much larger migration from Africa to Europe from happening in the future. But there are two clear choices facing Italy and the rest of Europe today. One is to find ways to invest in Africa now to help it build more modern and efficient cities and vastly improved education in order to temper out-migration and create better learners, workers, and inventors in the future. The other is to bury one’s head in the sand and wait for a future that will be far more wrenching and disruptive.
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