MARTI AAVIK ⟩ The role of immigration in Estonia's future

Migrants from Morocco climbing the border fence of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Photo: JESUS BLASCO DE AVELLANEDA

• We cannot place the hope of balancing the entire system (neither Europe nor Estonia) on immigration.
• Immigrants also get older every year and will eventually want to retire.
• We need people in Estonia who create as much added value as possible.

Estonia needs to create its own scoring system so that we get people who create as much added value as possible, Marti Aavik, member of the board of The Right party, writes in his response to Bolt manager Markus Villig, who sees future Europe rather as inhabited by black-skinned people.

The movement of specialists between countries is an important and good thing. Even in Russia, which saw hundreds of thousands of IT professionals flee the country in fear of being sent to war, there is now some good news, and Russians can hope for a clearer vision. Namely, a few days ago, ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad moved to Moscow with his family from Syria.

Here in Estonia, I came across a headline in Postimees that said «Europe's future is dark(skinned).» It's a summary of an interview by Neeme Raud with Bolt CEO Markus Villig. Villig says that in his opinion, aging Europe has two choices. One is robotization, but the entrepreneur is doubtful about the speed of this process. The other option, he says, is more likely: «After all, we need to bring in tens of millions of people, and Africa is clearly the place they will come from, because people simply won't be able to live there soon, and it has a young population.»

No matter how dark or of what skin color Europe's future might be, it is not possible to organize the kind of immigration that will maintain the working-to-retired population ratio. A quarter of a century ago, the United Nations estimated that in order to achieve this, 253 million people would have had to move to Russia, for example, over 50 years, 674 million to what was then the European Union, over 1.3 billion to Europe as a whole, and nearly 600 million to the United States.

Immigrants get old too

Immigrants also get older every year and will eventually want to retire and get help when they fall ill. This is why immigration does not solve, in the long term, the issues that societies will need to solve due to increasing life expectancy. Primarily, this involves how to manage healthcare and social benefits.

Let's imagine for a moment that Harry Potter waves his magic wand and ten million very hardworking, ambitious, and talented young adults suddenly appear in Estonia, who fall in love with our beautiful language, read all of Tammsaare's novels, and can quote lines from the film «Young Pensioner.» But let 30 or 40 years go by, and these magically summoned individuals will start to suffer from back pain, constipation, and would need a new young and capable doctor to prescribe a laxative or skillfully perform knee surgery. We would also need new toilers whose sweat and effort would pay for pensions. Shall we turn to the wizard again?

No matter how dark or of what skin color Europe's future might be, it is not possible to organize the kind of immigration that will maintain the working-to-retired population ratio.

True, countries are competing with each other for skilled medical professionals. There's a global talent hunt underway. In countries that have become even slightly wealthier, there's a shortage of people willing to do dirty, tedious, and dangerous work. However, we cannot place the hope of balancing the entire system, neither in all of Europe nor in Estonia, on immigration. Even if we completely disregard, in our hypothetical musings, the reactions of the receiving societies and their fate as nation-states, the scales simply don't match.

Let's create a system for assessing immigrants

We now also know about China's population decline and the looming pension crash for Comrade Xi Jinping's Communist Party. It is also known that birth rates are declining rapidly around the world (including Africa).

What we can and must do in Estonia is to introduce approximately the same scoring system as in Australia and Canada, so that people who create as much added value as possible come to Estonia. Second, we need to invest much more forcefully in language than we do now, and we must have the courage to demand it. At least as much as the Germans or the Swedes – as things stand, we are milder, more timid, more lame than them in our language proficiency requirements.

If there are still obstacles in Estonia that prevent the creation of high-paying, complex jobs, they must be removed. Just live, code, thrive, pay taxes! If you want to stay here, learn Estonian and respect our customs. It is precisely the preservation of the nation-state and other core European values that allows one to cope with moderate immigration.

The current situation in Europe is as follows: out of the EU's 448 million inhabitants, 42 million were born outside the EU. Twenty-seven million are not EU citizens. Moreover, only one-fifth of residence permits are work-related. The employment rate for EU citizens is higher (76 percent) than for immigrants (63 percent).

While we shouldn't be downplaying talent hunt, the statistics show that immigrants, compared to EU citizens, are overrepresented in various low-wage (auxiliary) jobs and underrepresented in higher-level, well-paid positions that require top-level skills. For example, only 1.7 percent of immigrants work in science and engineering-related jobs, compared to 3.5 percent of EU citizens, according to the latest OECD migration report.

This time, there's a whole chapter in it on migrant entrepreneurship. It reveals that the share of self-employed migrants has increased among migrants to OECD countries, and their proportion is higher than among nationals, reaching 17 percent. One explanation indeed is platform work. That is, Bolt and other companies with a similar business model are quick to let immigrants work for themselves, rather than treating driving a taxi more rigorously than becoming a doctor.

Africa is an opportunity

Whether it alone is the magic wand that will make the «aging» Europe shine youthfully, along with the rest of the world, I dare to doubt. A more meaningful takeaway for me from Villig's talk is the opportunities that Africa's population growth can offer. Despite the current weight of the continent in the world's population, Africa is quite «dark» on many world maps. It suffices to look at air and ship connections, communications, weight in global science, etc., etc. – these societies still have a lot of room for substantive growth.

One of the postulates of Ernst Ravenstein, the 19th century scientist and pioneer in the study of migration, is that most migrants move a short distance. That is to say, people of migratory age, young adults, move to cities in these same African countries. In Europe, where the birth rate was more or less at the current African level around 1900, people have already forgotten the horrors and charms of ultra-fast urbanization. All this, however, means opportunities for growth. It's great that Estonian entrepreneurs are thinking about these things too.