Many immigrants to the West lack the skills required in high-tech economies. The rise of AI therefore makes mass immigration even more detrimental, according to the renowned American social geographer Joel Kotkin.
Kotkin is perhaps best known for his book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class’, in which he predicts a much greater concentration of power and wealth in a hierarchical class society where the middle class is under threat, and a dramatic growth in a propertyless class of modern serfs.
In an opinion piece in The Telegraph two weeks ago, Kotkin predicts that artificial intelligence risks expanding a permanent, unemployed underclass that will live in poverty.
Immigration has been seen as a good source of labour and economic stimulus in countries with low birth rates. This assumption has, to put it mildly, always been debatable. But now it no longer holds water.
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.
Even if an economy is growing, GDP per capita can fall, which means that most people are worse off.
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.
Non-Western immigrants prefer to live in wealthy welfare states, which are thus existentially threatened by mass immigration. This hits the poor who were already living there the hardest:
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.
This trend will only make the problem worse:
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.
However, even in highly skilled occupations, the demand for workers may soon decline:
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.
The more welfare, the worse it gets:
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.
It is a short step to crime. Recent experiences in Europe also suggest that this could lead to serious social unrest.
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 in the EU are considering a stricter immigration policy, observes Kotkin, who envisages that hardliners on immigration will come to power in several European countries.
As usual, our own fools are the last in the world to get the message.
