Report on the Cost of Immigration Comes Out – Originating University Wants Rid of It

ER Editor: It is not linked to below, so we tracked down the original Dutch report. The professor tweeting out this report, Dr. Jan van der Beek of the University of Amsterdam School of Economics, can be found here on Twitter. He is one of three authors of the report; it was tweeted out on March 3, 2021. Sadly we don’t have Dutch except through online translation.

Here is start of the Summary section, originally written in English, found on pp.19-24. These five pages are well worth our time:

Summary

The report “Borderless welfare state” deals with the consequences of immigration for Dutch public finances. It answers the following questions:

• What are the fiscal costs and benefits of immigration by migration motive (labour, study, asylum and family migration) and by region of origin?

• To what extent can immigration provide a solution to the ageing population in the Netherlands?

The current report is an update of the Public Sector chapter of the report Immigration and the Dutch Economy (2003) by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. Both reports deploy the method of generational accounting to calculate the net contribution – revenues minus expenses – of immigrants to public finances, measured from the moment of their immigration to the time of repatriation or death. This net contribution is the key concept of the current study.

The study uses microdata from 2016 provided by Statistics Netherlands. These are very detailed, anonymized data of all 17 million Dutch residents, including about two million people with a first-generation migration background and almost two million people with a second-generation migration background.

Total costs of immigration

The rapid pace of immigration into the Netherlands has greatly increased the Dutch population, but not the sustainability of the Dutch welfare state. Of the 17 million Dutch inhabitants at the end of 2019, 13% were born abroad (first generation) and 11% were children of immigrants (second generation). Currently, per capita expenditures on immigrants are significantly higher than on indigenous people in areas such as education, social security and benefits. Moreover, immigrants pay fewer taxes and social security premiums, which further lowers their net fiscal contribution. The main findings for the net contribution (benefits minus costs) of the first two generations together are given below.

The total net costs for the Dutch public sector of immigration in the period 1995-2019 averaged €17 billion per year, with a peak of €32 billion in 2016 due to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. By comparison, the Dutch government also spent roughly €30 billion on education in 2016. As for totals, the total costs of immigration over the period 1995-2019 amounted to €400 billion. To put that into perspective: these government expenditures have the same order of magnitude as the total Dutch natural gas revenues at €400 billion from the start of extraction until 2019. The current study looks back at past data as well as forecasts from Statistics Netherlands to calculate the total cost of immigration for the next two decades if policy remains unchanged.

Readers may be interested in this short article from Dutch Review from last year titled By 2050, 40% of the working population in the Netherlands will have a migrant background.

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The University of Amsterdam wants to get rid of a research report on the cost of immigration

GEFIRA

When social peace is based on people’s ability to believe in something they don’t actually believe in, paradoxical thinking prevails.

In 2006, above an article in the Financial Times, the following curious headline read: “The troubled cosmopolitan: how migrants enrich an increasingly concerned host.” While there is high unemployment among non-Western immigrants in Western countries, Western intellectuals still believe that overall non-Western immigration is economically beneficial to white European countries. Probably it was because of this conviction that the University of Amsterdam agreed to contribute to an extensive research on the cost or benefits of immigration.

After 3 years of extensive data analysis, the researchers published their results in a report called: “Boundless [sic] Welfare State” (ER: Check original title). The report examined the public cost, like social security, and public income, such as taxes, collected from immigrants. It turned out that especially non-Western immigration is a huge burden for Dutch society. Immigrants have cost the Dutch people 400 billion euros over the last few decades. If the Dutch state continues to accept more immigrants, the expenditure will only go up further. The report not only estimated the enormous burden of mass-immigration for the Dutch population, it also did away with the belief that education could elevate poor immigrants from Africa and Central Asia.

It came as no surprise that the academic community of Amsterdam was unhappy with the outcome. Facts are only facts, whether or not they are in line with the current political and religious convictions. That was as much the case in Galileo’s day as it is now. The report was produced with the full cooperation of the University of Amsterdam, which demanded that the researchers remove the university’s name and logo from the report and all references to the sponsor of the survey.

The researchers used for their analyses so called “micro data” from the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. Under the current Dutch regulations, the Central Bureau of Statistics only makes this data available to reputable research institutes such as universities. The Central Bureau of Statistics explicitly asked the researchers to publish the results under the university’s flag in accordance with the Project Agreement and to post them on the university website.

While a political party funded the report, the research was transferred to the University of Amsterdam at the request of one of the researchers to get access to the “micro data” from the CBS. It was contractually stated that the independent researchers were free, and none of the parties was allowed to exert pressure favouring a specific outcome. According to the project agreement, the University of Amsterdam is contractually ”responsible for the published results” and the report should be ”published under its own name”.

The report’s findings demonstrate that reality is at odds with the university’s wishful thinking and political ideas. The university threatened to deny an affiliated researcher access to its institutions if their demand to remove the name of the university from the report was not met.

These events show again that the scientific community has become highly ideologized. It prefers political correctness over fact finding and it bends reality to fit its own superstition. Science has become an ideological truncheon with which the general public is forced to comply with political alignment around immigration issues.

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Source

Published to The Liberty Beacon from EuropeReloaded.com

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