It has become one of the most often repeated mantras of our late Soviet age of European—or, rather, of EU—history: “We need immigration.” A continent with too few births and too much debt is told time and again by its political class that it will survive only by importing millions of new workers from the Third World. The idea is repeated by politicians, quantified by economists, and echoed by journalists. But decades of mass migration have left Europe poorer in relative terms than it has been since, at least, the 15th century. Europeans have been fed a lie.
