In Douglas Adams’ satirical science fiction series *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, the name appears in connection with an institution that brings to mind our own everyday lives: The Maximegalon Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious (MISPWOSO).
For is it not the case that many things are obvious to sensible people, whilst less sensible people do not recognise them until they have been analysed to the point of absurdity – and perhaps not even then?
Nettavisen has, in a certainly commendable piece of work on Friday, demonstrated that the immigrant population in the five municipalities in Eastern Norway – Lørenskog, Rælingen, Ullensaker, Lillestrøm and Drammen – has risen significantly since the turn of the millennium, whilst the median tax paid by people aged 35 to 66 has fallen over the same period. Well, isn’t that just the thing?
It’s all very well that this has been documented, but what if we were soon to start regarding this phenomenon as some sort of sociological law across Europe?
On 12 June 2006, Aftenposten published an article by Halvor Tjønn on a study carried out by NHO experts who had concluded that labour force participation amongst the immigrant population with no-Western background was so low that Norwegian welfare benefits could end up costing us our entire oil wealth. So shouldn’t every sensible person have been worried about this as early as twenty years ago?
The government-appointed Brochmann Iand II committees, set up by the government, concluded in 2011 and 2017 respectively that large-scale immigration of people with low labour force participation could undermine the sustainability of the welfare state and increase pressure on public finances, thereby essentially confirming the NHO analysis.
No one who has spent any time in Norway with their eyes open over the last twenty years should be surprised by these conclusions, not least because similar conclusions had already been drawn in other European countries.
In Christopher Caldwell’s book *Reflections on the Revolution in Europe*, which was published in 2009 and released electronically in Norwegian by Document in 2010 and in print in 2013, the author writes:
For immigrants to help the welfare state, they and their descendants must pay more into welfare fund than they take out. They don’t work or earn enough to do that. The evidence is that immigrants take more out of welfare than they pay in. In the Netherlands, for instance, 40 percent of immigrants get some form of government assistance. According to the Institute for the Future of Work, while native Germans between the ages of twenty and sixty-five pay out more in taxes than they collect in services, Turks do that only between the ages of twenty-eight and fifty-seven.
One of the amazing statistics in the history of European immigration is that the number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 — from 3 million to about 7.5 million — but the number of employed foreigners in the workforce did not budge. It stayed rock steady at roughly 2 million people. In 1973, 65 percent of German immigrants were in the workforce; in 1983, a decade later, only 38 percent were.
This evolution has been replicated across Europe. In 1994 in France, just 29 percent of all immigrants came for work purposes.
Seven years after Tjønn’s shocking article, the reviewer Aage Borchgrevink – whose talent for seeing the obvious is open to question – in Aftenposten that Caldwell’s analysis seemed ‘somewhat outdated’.
Jonas Bals, not exactly known as an intellectual giant, in turn described the award-winning, Harvard-educated writer for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as a ‘lightweight’.
It thus took Anders Magnus twenty years from the NHO’s shock analysis before he publicly voiced serious concerns about, amongst other things, the imbalance between what is paid into the welfare state and what is paid out.
Kåre Willoch had reportedly understood the big picture whilst he was Prime Minister in the 1980s, but had been silenced by his own ministers. You should have seen it.
But how many decades will it actually take for the biggest laggards to realise that mass immigration is a financial disaster for the state? It is, of course, a disaster in several other ways too, but this at least is easy to demonstrate with hard figures.
So now we know that Lørenskog has gone from being a wealthy to a poor municipality over the course of a quarter of a century of immigration. And we must even be grateful for this small step towards realisation. If we cannot see the wood for the trees, we can at least see the odd tree here and there. Well, well.
