NEW YORK—The millions of refugees pouring into Europe should prove a boon to its slow-growing economies. However, with unemployment so high in austerity-burdened Mediterranean states, German eagerness to fill jobs with Syrians and other refugees is an indictment of the European Union’s dysfunctional economy and cultural rigidity.
Numerous economic studies show immigrants boost growth when native workers are in short supply, or they provide skills complementary to the indigenous work force. California agriculture would not be possible without migrant labor, and America’s homebuilders would be hard pressed to get along without Central American masons and carpenters.
In the 1950s, Turkish and Caribbean immigrants boosted economic growth in the U.K. and Germany; more recently, arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe have helped the U.K. economy outperform a German economy saddled with an aging population and labor shortages.
Many refugees pressing through Hungary to reach Germany and other prosperous northern economies, like those fleeing Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe for America in the 1960s, bring significant skills.
