This article is written by Fyodor Dmitrenko, a WES 2025 student journalist and writer for Le Dragon Déchaîné.
“Our role is to make sure that when [migration] happens it is safe, it is regular, it is dignified and to the mutual benefit of the countries where migrants come from as well as countries where migrants go to, as well as migrants themselves.” (1) Thus began the first talk of the second day of the Warwick Economics Summit (WES).
Ugochi Daniels, whose speech I just quoted, has long been a titan in the field of migration. She served in numerous positions in agencies across the field including Chief of Staff for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) between 2020 and 2021, United Nations Resident Coordinator for Iran between 2018 and 2020, and presently as the Deputy Director General of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
As my parents were migrants themselves, fleeing the instability of Russia in the decade immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the tranquil island of Cyprus, Ms. Daniel’s work is unsurprisingly dear to my heart.
Rather than simply quoting Ms. Daniels, I would like to expand on her sentiments. Her talk inspires me to argue that legal migration is not only beneficial to source and receiving countries, but it is in fact, a necessity for receiving states. However, the political establishments and general populations of these receiving states seem to be unwilling to accept this necessity. We have seen this demonstrated via the pushback against freer migration regimes. This unwillingness has also manifested through the increase in mainstream political engagement with anti-immigrant extremists like the Alternatif fur Deutschland (AfD) or Rassemblement National (RN) in the European Parliament and national legislatures, and through the election of US President Trump on a platform of cracking down on migration.
First of all, it is important to define that in the context of legal migration, I am primarily referring to migrants rather than asylum seekers. The key difference rests in the reason for displacement. Migrants are typically voluntary migrants looking for work or other opportunities in the economies of receiving countries, whereas asylum seekers and refugees are typically involuntary migrants displaced by conflict or persecution in their source countries (paraphrased from the UNHCR New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants).
Labour migration is generally beneficial to source countries because it gives their governments greater breathing room in terms of service provision and therefore political stability. For example, Nigeria’s rapid population growth has meant that the population has frequently exceeded the available work opportunities and services leading to political instability. Regular legal migration pathways allow the transfer of a portion of this population abroad, thereby reducing strain on services and leading to less volatile development.
Migration also generates other benefits for source countries such as significant incomes for developing economies through remittances and the taxation thereof. For example, remittances make up around 42% of the GDP of many source countries like Tajikistan according to data by the World Bank published in 2024 (2). Similarly, Mr. Kevin Chika Urama, another WES speaker and an African Development Bank economist, has termed “brain circulation”: the transfer of expertise between economies of different countries via the migrant diaspora. He illustrated this using an autobiographical example of him imparting his experience gained in the UK banking sector in his home country of Nigeria.
Moreover, labour migration is not only beneficial, but I would argue, undoubtedly necessary for receiving states in developed regions like the EU. This is because of the increasingly ageing population structure. According to Eurostat, as of 2019, 20.3% of all people living in the EU were 65 years or older – a number that is expected to rise to almost 30% in 2050 (3).
This increasingly top-heavy population structure places a growing financial burden on the state to provide social security to a greater number of dependents than ever before, while the size of the taxable working population intended to carry this financial burden decreases. This phenomenon then engenders necessary restructuring, for example, cutting the breadth of coverage or social program depth or taking up significant debt, unless something is done about the population pyramid.
Labour migration of young people from the aforementioned source countries thus helps to maintain current European social democratic regimes like those of France and Germany and the living standards enjoyed under them. This form of migration helps maintain the large working population to fund these systems and their respective taxation requirements, without painful (and politically challenging) changes to taxation regimes.
While other strategies to deal with this issue certainly do exist, they have so far generally failed to replace the effectiveness of migration as a policy.
For example, raising the retirement age, while a logical solution in the short term, is only a politically convenient stop-gap in the long term. It does not fundamentally improve the population structure and merely holds off the issue until the next administration comes into office.
A key piece of evidence for this is the fact that most EU member countries have retirement ages between 62 and 67, while the median age of current workers in member states edges ever closer to this number (4). A 2022 figure by Eurostat noted that over half of the EU population were around 44.4 years old (5).
Similarly, retraining schemes for older workers to update their skills and adapt to changing market conditions to stay longer in the workforce have significant limitations. While they help develop a multi-generational workforce on the macro level, workers typically have no incentive to continue working past retirement age within EU member states.
More permanent means to rebalance the population structure that aren’t based around migration, such as Hungary’s family allowances and family tax benefit schemes, have been attempted. However, as evidenced by the nation’s continued steep population decline, these have not been particularly successful.
Hence it is needless to say that as Ms. Daniels put it, migration “is the reason why many developed countries' economies are still able to grow.” I firmly believe that this strategy is not only beneficial but an undoubtedly necessary lifeline for both source and receiving countries.
The views and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Warwick Economics Summit.
References:
Audio recording of Ms. Daniels’s Talk at the WES 2025, Saturday 25th January 2025
World Bank Open Data. “World Bank Open Data,” n.d. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true.
Eurostat. "Population Structure and Ageing." Statistics Explained. Data extracted February 2024. European Commission. Accessed February 9, 2025. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_structure_and_ageing.
“Pension Reform in France: Which Countries Have the Lowest and Highest Retirement Ages in Europe?” Euronews, April 6, 2023. https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/04/06/pension-reform-in-france-which-countries-have-the-lowest-and-highest-retirement-ages-in-eu.
Eurostat. 2023. “Half of EU’s Population Older Than 44.4 Years in 2022.” Eurostat, February 22, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/fr/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20230222-1.
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