Laura Laplaud
modified to
11:34 a.m., January 17, 2023
By presenting the pension reform, the executive provides an answer to the problem of longer lifespans but does not take into account the drop in births. Will we have to “bring in 50 million immigrants to balance the active population in 2050” as Jean-Paul Delevoye said in 2019?
Will the pension reform put our system back on track as the government suggests? By proposing to raise the legal age of departure from 62 to 64, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne takes into account the extension of the lifespan of the French but forgets one point: the low birth rate. How to fill this future demographic deficit? As Jean-Paul Delevoye had said, “should we bring in 50 million immigrants to compensate in 2050”, wondered Bruno Retailleau, president of the group Les Républicains au Sénat, guest of Europe Matin this Tuesday.
A “replacement” migration as a solution
The former High Commissioner for Pension Reform Jean-Paul Delevoye mentioned this figure during a trip to Créteil in 2019. “I am very struck by the reaction of European peoples, since European demography and its aging mean that if we want to keep the same number of active people in the economic machine (…), it will take 50 million foreign populations in quotation marks to balance the active population in 2050, in Europe”, he declared.
A document from 2000
Is it true ? Is this wrong? What document was it based on? Jean-Paul Delevoye would have unearthed this figure in a UN report dating from 2000, entitled “LReplacement migration: is it a solution to declining and aging populations? In this study, six scenarios are considered from 2000 to 2050 based on eight countries and geographical areas including France and the European Union. Based on Scenario III established by the report, which forecasts and assumes a necessary migration to maintain the total population at the highest possible level in the absence of migration after 1995, the number of migrants necessary maintaining the level of the total population would amount to 47.4 million.
By rounding off, Jean-Paul Delevoye was therefore right, to one precision. Scenario III envisages compensation for the total population of the European Union and not only for the active population, unlike scenario IV which indicates the number of 79.605 million immigrants in the European Union to balance the population active by 2050.
But if the European Union wanted to maintain its 1995 ratio, it would have to take in 701 million migrants. Be that as it may, relying on this text, Jean-Paul Delevoye neglected two details: the projection date, 1995, and the enlargement of the European Union from 15 Member States to 27 today. Is the arrival of millions of immigrants a solution to offset the risks linked to the aging of the population? The text seems to validate this idea: “The decline and aging of the population will have profound effects […] compelling governments to reassess many economic, social and political issues including those relating to international migration.”