For much of the past half century, mass immigration – the more the better – was seen as a magic elixir for developed countries. It would defend against the actuarial consequences of low birthrates and rapid ageing, while recharging the economy.

This logic is increasingly flawed. Yes, many Western countries do need to keep some immigration, but looking abroad as a source of demographic salvation makes little sense. And not just because of the scenes the world has been witnessing in France, where a crisis of integration has fuelled the violent protests that have broken out across French cities.

Are Western countries really facing a shortage of home-born workers? Consider the situation in America, where some estimates suggest that one-third of working-age males are neither in school nor working, the highest percentage in a half century.

Much the same can be said of other countries. In the UK and in Canada, a huge proportion of the population under 30 is neither in school nor a job. Without expanding opportunities for these young people, including the descendants of recent immigrants, we are engineering the expansion of a permanent, work-free underclass.

Of course, much opposition to mass immigration possesses ugly nativist elements. But it’s also clear that recent waves of migration have done little to spark economic growth. Is it a coincidence that some of the countries with the highest per capita rates of immigration in recent years – including the UK, Canada, Germany, and France – have also been suffering from stagnant economies? Even in high migration countries that have achieved growth, GDP per capita has struggled. From 2014 to 2022, Canada ranked third-lowest among 30 countries for average growth per person over the period.

Much of this is likely to be down to who is immigrating. Many new migrants today lack the skills to thrive in an increasingly high-tech economy. In the US, in 2021, immigrants accounted for almost a quarter of all America’s poor, despite representing just 14 per cent of the population. Evidence from California suggests the rate of poverty among undocumented migrants was almost three times that of the population as a whole.

Contrary to some claims, welfare dependency can also be far higher among recent immigrants than the native born. Among Minnesota’s Somali immigrants, welfare use is estimated to be four times the rate of native-born families. It, moreover, seems likely that mass migration impacts the salaries of low-income workers, who must compete with the new arrivals for living space, jobs, and social services.

Technological changes seem likely to depress demand for low-skilled immigrants. The rapid development of robots will eliminate all sorts of low-end jobs, from fast-food preparation and package-handling to bed-making, elderly care, and toilet-cleaning.

Even if these trends take some time to reach fruition, America, and increasingly Europe, already have a diminished need for such low-skill workers. In the US, the overall proportion of jobs requiring extensive manual labour dropped to 22 per cent of all jobs in 2025. Even the ranks of truck drivers – nearly one in six is foreign-born in the US – will be culled by the rise of autonomous vehicles.

There remain shortages of skilled manufacturing workers. In the US, there is also widespread demand for new workers in medical services, and in some technical jobs, in places such as Silicon Valley. But the rise of artificial intelligence appears to be reducing demand for software writers; seeing reduced tech jobs as a result of AI, Japan recently chose to make labour migration even harder.

In highly evolved welfare states like the UK, Canada and the EU, the situation is, if anything, even worse. In Canada, one in five recent immigrants are now living in poverty, with many in “deep poverty” – an income below 75 per cent of the poverty line – compared to only 5 per cent of the whole population. Among Europe’s foreign-born population, now at a record of over 64 million, newcomers also are more dependent on some forms of welfare transfers than are natives. In Spain, which recently legalised hundreds of thousands of migrants, the percentage of immigrants at risk of poverty is roughly three times that of the native population.

Perhaps even more alarming, migrants to Europe have been disproportionately involved in crime. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics shows that foreign nationals were three times more likely to be arrested for sex offences than British citizens, for example.

Much the same is happening across the Channel. The World Prison Brief concludes that foreign nationals made up 24.4 per cent of France’s prison population in 2025, much higher than their share of the overall population. In Italy, recent data showed that non-natives account for nearly one-third of all prison inmates, despite representing around one-tenth of the resident population.

Worse yet, Third World migration, largely from the Middle East and North Africa, has sparked the rise of Islamism, an ideology that rejects the tenets of liberal society and all too often embraces terrorism.

Even the dunderheads of the European Union, as well as many individual European states, are considering tougher immigration standards. In the US, concern over immigration helped Donald Trump win his last presidential election. It could now bring Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, or Germany’s AfD to power in the near future.

Nativism embraced by the hard-Right addresses these questions but does not provide a workable solution. Given the continued need for some immigrants, high-income countries need to develop a Fabian approach, giving priority to those, based on culture, age and skills, most likely to add to each country’s economic and technological vibrancy. This requires not an open border, or a closed door, but a well-regulated one.