A lie repeated a thousand times: “we need [non-European] immigrants.”

We are told constantly by the mainstream media and academia that without these non-European immigrants many jobs would not be occupied, many vacancies would be left unfilled and this would be a detriment to our business fabric and the economy in general.

“Who will clean the bathrooms?” They tell us. Or, they ask “who would work in our shopping centres or public construction sites? Who would drive our buses or trains? This is an obvious fallacy that, however, has easy adhesion in the ears of the majority given what you see.

Those who understand economics know that often what you see is more important than what you don’t see. Now, if we walk around our shopping centres or near a public construction site, for example, we hardly see native Europeans working, so the most immediate thing is to think that “without these workers there would be a shortage of manpower. ” Nothing more wrong, though.

First, the market self-regulates: when there is a shortage of labour in a certain job, the employer realizes that he has to raise the salary for that said job. Second, non-European workers come to put downward pressure on salaries, lowering wages. Coming from poorer countries, it is clear that they easily accept our minimum wage, which will always be higher for them than what they previously earned. Third, and not least, it is important to note that several countries richer than most Western European countries, which for various reasons have virtually no immigrants (such as Japan or Iceland), have no vacancies in construction, services or public transport.

According to the fallacy of ‘the Europeans do not want to these jobs’, for the most part, the Japanese or Icelanders would not either. And yet they do, even though they are far more educated and in the Japanese case with the highest intelligence quotient (IQ) in the world. However, it is not reported that in Japan there is a lack of maids or bricklayers. Employers simply pay what the market requires to see their jobs filled.

It is urgent to dismantle this fallacious economistic and liberalist argument. Even if Europeans did not want to “clean bathrooms” this would not be a reason to import millions of non-Europeans to compete with them. But this is not even true, because, for decades, many Southern Europeans in North-Western European countries did this kind of work. Like the Icelanders and Japanese who simply continued to do so because they did not open their doors to massive immigration.

There is also another factor to ad up to this problem that goes beyond the law of supply and demand, which is the incoming 4th Industrial Revolution or the automation of most low skilled jobs/ repetitive labour. Automation is already threatening 25% of the jobs in the United States, 10% of the jobs in the United Kingdom and other similar rates in most European countries, leaving us an enormous mass of unskilled, immigrant labour now jobless and without much prospects of finding other means of employment, creating an even greater rift and animosity between them and their host societies.

Text mostly translated and adapted from the Facebook Page – O Bom Europeu or the ‘Good European’ in Portuguese