(CNSNews.com) – International migration can slow, but not reverse Europe’s looming demographic crisis, according to a December report by the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
“Europe added the second largest number of international migrants between 2000 and 2015 (20 million, or 1.3 million per year),” the UN report stated. Of those, 75 percent were between the ages of 20 and 64.
But even with this large influx of working-age immigrants, “old-age dependency ratios are projected to increase from 26 to 48 per 100 in Europe” - compared to 38 per 100 in North America by 2050.
“Because international migrants tend to include a larger proportion of working-age persons compared to the overall population, positive net migration can contribute to reducing old-age dependency ratios. However, international migration cannot reverse, or halt, the long-term trend toward population ageing,” the UN report stated.
“In Europe, the population would have declined during the period 2000-2015 in the absence of positive net migration,” it continued.
“Although current migration levels will not be sufficient to compensate for the surplus of deaths over births, population decline would be more pronounced and would have started earlier under a scenario of zero net migration.”
A 2012 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that about a third of all pregnancies in Europe between 1995 and 2003 ended in abortion. Birth rates below the replacement level (2.1 children per woman) have created a demographic crisis in which a declining population of young workers is expected to support a growing number of elderly retirees.
“In 2014, the EU population stood at 507 million people, of whom only 169 million (or 33.3%) were children or young people (aged under 30),” down from 40.6% in 1994, according to a 2015 report by EuroStat entitled Being Young in Europe Today.
The EuroStat report noted that singles (31.4%) and childless couples (24.7%) now comprise the majority of EU households (56.1%).
“To get some idea of the speed of demographic change, there were 88.6 million children in the EU-27 in 1994, compared with 68.9 million elderly persons,” EuroStat reported. “By 2014 there were 93.9 million people in the EU-28 aged 65 or more, compared with 79.1 million children.”
Because the number of European children has decreased, there will be a smaller cohort of European women to give birth in the future. EuroStat estimates that “by 2080, the number of children and young people in the EU-28 is likely to be 162.2 million, which is 7.8 million less than in 2013.”
“Maintaining welfare systems, pension schemes and public healthcare systems is likely to pose a challenge, while the overall demand for such services is likely to increase due to the rising number of elderly people,” EuroStat concluded.