the times | Wednesday October 14 2020 2GM 31
The World at Five
Struggling Spain is
sick man of Europe
In depth and online today at 5pm
thetimes.co.uk
Ed McGinty staging his
one-man daily protestJONATHAN ERNST/REUTERSwill stop the rot
on the back foot in the sunshine state
Immigrants give Italy
€500 million a year
more than they take
Immigrants benefit Italy by €500 mil-
lion a year, a study has found, boosting
claims that the nation needs more
foreign workers.
The Leone Moressa Foundation
compared the taxes paid by the
5.26 million migrants in Italy with the
total cost of hosting them.
It found that the expense of sending
them to schools, treating them in
hospitals and housing them in council
homes was half a billion euros less than
the annual taxes they pay.
Monia Giovannetti, vice-president
of ASGI, an Italian association that
promotes legal rights for migrants, said
that such research was useful because
Italians did not see this side of the social
contributions. “They only see foreigners
as people who exploit services and
benefits as opposed to people who
create wealth for the country,” she said.
Foreigners living legally in Italy
make up 8.7 per cent of the population,
with Romanians the largest group
followed by Albanians, Moroccans and
Chinese. Together they paid the state
€26.6 billion in taxes in 2018, paying
income tax while working mostly in
low-paid jobs, contributing to pensions
and VAT as well as paying taxes on
cigarettes and petrol.
The state benefits they received
added up to €26.1 billion, leaving a
profit of €500 million for the state.
Apart from health, housing,
education and local services, the total
includes the €3.3 billion spent on caring
for migrants in reception centres after
they arrive on boats from Africa,
processing their asylum claims and
offering them social-integration
training.
Italy’s migrant population has
increased over the past decade as thenation’s birth rate has dropped to the
lowest level since records began in 1861,
with women averaging 1.29 children, far
lower than the 2.1 required to maintain
the population.
The demographic trend prompted
claims that immigrants would be
needed to pay the pensions of Italians.
The survey did not include illegal
migrants, thought to number about
600,000. An Italian government
amnesty and offer of a work permit was
answered by 220,000 illegal immigrants,
most of whom were domestic cleaners.
“If they start paying taxes it will mean
another €360 million a year for the
state,” Enrico Di Pasquale, a researcher
at the foundation, said.
The anti-migrant politician Matteo
Salvini opposed the amnesty, claiming
that the government was “crying for
poor migrants but not lifting a finger for
millions of jobless Italians”.
He has criticised the government for
failing to stop more than 10,000
Tunisians who sailed to Italy this year.
Mr Salvini claims that more will be
encouraged to come as Rome eases
some of the anti-migrant measures he
imposed as interior minister last year.
He says that foreign workers push down
wages, driving Italians into poverty.
“It is true that migrants do depress
wages,” Alfonso Giordano, a professor
of political geography at Luiss
university in Rome, said. “But that is
happening while Italian employers are
de-localising to China and India to take
advantage of lower pay — that is
globalisation.”
One sector in which a workforce of
migrants, often illegal, has kept wages
low is agriculture, which employs up to
a million non-Italians. The sociologist
Marco Omizzolo said: “You cannot,
however, say they have pushed down
pay for Italian pickers because there are
hardly any in the first place.”Italy
Tom Kington RomeFlorida, his first since being treated for Covid-19. He will return to the state on Friday after visits to other key battlegrounds
German population falls
for first time in decade
The population of Germany has fallen
for the first time in a decade as a dip in net
immigration compounded the effects of
a long decline in the birth rate.
Since 2011 the number of people in
the country had grown from 80.2 million
to a record 83.2 million last year. In the
past six months it has dropped by
40,000, according to provisional
figures published yesterday by the
Federal Statistical Office.
This dent is almost entirely the result
of a slump in inward migration during
the pandemic. Deaths have outnum-
bered births in Germany for nearly half
a century and with zero immigration
the population would dwindle by about
160,000 people a year.
In 2015 an influx of migrants, chiefly
from North Africa, the Middle East and
south Asia, drove up the numbers by
717,000 in a year. But since then immi-gration from outside Europe has
declined, with arrivals from the west
Balkans and some of the newer EU
member states, such as Bulgaria, Croatia
and Romania, making up an increasing
share of the country’s residents.
As a result the population rose by
94,000 in the second half of 2019 and
continued to grow at a similar rate in
January and February of this year. But
from March to May, it decreased by
59,000 people as Germany went into a
six-week lockdown and deaths out-
weighed births and new immigrants.
The proportion of foreigners in the
population actually fell in April and
May but rose in June to 12.6 per cent.
The statistics office expects the
population to keep growing until at
least 2024 and to decline from 2040 at
the latest, settling at between 74 million
and 83 million by 2060. The workforce
is forecast to shrink from 51.8 million
in 2018 to between 45.8 million and
47.4 million in 2035 as society ages.Germany
Oliver Moody Berlin
one. That 300 residents would be bold
enough to parade through the streets
with “Biden 2020” banners on their golf
carts last week qualifies as a grey revolt.
“There’s courage in numbers,” Chris
Stanley, head of the Villages’ Demo-
cratic Club, said. “I’ve never been called
names so often as I have here. But as
Trump gets more awful, it’s empower-
ing people to say, ‘What can I do to help
get him out?’ ”
The pandemic is a key factor in grow-
ing doubts around Mr Trump in Flor-
ida, where 736,024 infections and 15,412
deaths have been recorded, mainly
among the elderly. “It’s a visceral issue,
it’s literally life and death,” Aubrey Jew-
ett, professor of political science at the
University of Central Florida, said.
The president’s first election rally
since his own infection, held an hour
from the Villages in Sanford on
Monday, could only have entrenched
the views of opponents. Thousands
stood closely packed with few wearing
masks as the president said that he
was immune and wanted to
kiss them all.
However, for
staunch Republi-
cans Mr Trump’s
strengths lie in
more fundamen-
tal areas. Edna
Iris Santana-
Wales, 72, said: “I
want my freed-
oms — freedom of
speech, gun rights,freedom of religion, right to life. I take it
very seriously when somebody says,
‘I’m going to take away all your guns.’ ”
Back at his roadside protest, Mr
McGinty says he now hears more
shouts of support from motor-
ists than abuse. “Two
women told me they
didn’t know there were
other Democrats in
The Villages until
they saw me,” he said.
“They’d been consid-
ering moving out.”
He does, however,
recall the time that a
Trump supporter
rammed his cart and
threatened a brawl. Mr
McGinty pepper-sprayed
him and threw him in a hedge.g his
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