Italy Needs 280,000 Immigrants a Year. Its Birthrate Says It Will Get Them.

It takes a particular kind of political imagination to design a social insurance system based on the assumption that your population will grow forever, and then to express surprise when it does not. This is the situation in which Italy finds itself in 2026, along with Japan, South Korea, Spain, and a dozen other nations that have discovered — rather late in the game — that demography is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not negotiate.

The numbers are not subtle. Italy's total fertility rate stands at 1.24 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. Its population is projected to decline from 59 million today to 47 million by 2070, according to Eurostat projections published in March 2025. The median age is already 48 years old — the second-oldest population on Earth after Japan. By 2050, one in three Italians will be over 65. The pension system, designed in 1969 when the average Italian had 2.4 children and died at 72, now faces a population where the average woman has 1.24 children and lives to 84.

The Italian government's own forecasts, buried in the 2024 Economic and Financial Document submitted to the European Commission, estimate that maintaining current pension and healthcare obligations will require an additional 280,000 working-age immigrants per year through 2050. The document was 347 pages long. The immigration estimate appeared on page 312. It has not been mentioned in a single campaign speech by any sitting minister.

The Precedent We Pretend Not to See

This is not, of course, without historical precedent. France faced a similar reckoning in the 1950s and chose immigration — Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians — to staff its factories and fill its ranks. Germany did the same in the 1960s, importing Turkish Gastarbeiter who were supposed to leave and did not. Both countries now have vibrant far-right movements that claim immigration has destroyed national identity, a claim that would be more persuasive if those movements proposed an alternative method for funding pensions when there are 0.8 workers for every retiree.

Japan, by contrast, chose the opposite path: virtually no immigration, a fertility rate of 1.26, and a society now so elderly that adult diaper sales exceed infant diaper sales. The Japanese government has spent three decades attempting to raise the birthrate through subsidies, tax credits, and public exhortation. The result, according to Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, has been a fertility increase of 0.04 children per woman since 1995. The cost: approximately $47 billion in family support programs. That works out to roughly $1.1 trillion per additional child ever born.

The Argument They Haven't Made

One is tempted to observe that there are precisely three ways to manage a collapsing dependency ratio: increase the numerator (more workers), decrease the denominator (cut benefits or delay retirement), or eliminate the system entirely. European politicians have spent the last two decades pretending there is a fourth option that involves neither immigration, nor austerity, nor collapse — a sort of demographic miracle in which young people simultaneously have more children, work longer hours, pay higher taxes, and do not emigrate to countries with better prospects.

The policy incoherence is remarkable. Italy's government, led by Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, has simultaneously increased family allowances to encourage childbearing and tightened immigration enforcement to reduce foreign arrivals. The 2025 budget allocated €4.6 billion for family support — enough to raise the birthrate, according to demographic economist Massimo Livi-Bacci of the University of Florence, by approximately 0.07 children per woman if the entire amount were perfectly efficient and sustained for thirty years. Meanwhile, Italy issues approximately 136,000 work permits annually, less than half the number its own Treasury Department says it needs.

South Korea offers an even more instructive case study in denial. Its fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded by a sovereign nation in peacetime. The government has spent $270 billion on pro-natalist policies since 2006, according to research published in the Korean Journal of Public Policy in August 2024. The result: the fertility rate has fallen by 0.58 children per woman during the same period. Seoul now offers $740 per month to parents of newborns, free childcare, and subsidised housing for families with three or more children. Last year, 249,000 babies were born — fewer than the number of South Koreans who died.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The academic literature on fertility recovery is unambiguous and depressing. No developed nation that has fallen below a fertility rate of 1.5 has ever returned above 1.8 without substantial immigration, according to a comprehensive analysis by the Vienna Institute of Demography published in Population and Development Review in 2023. The closest any nation has come is France, which raised its rate from 1.66 in 1993 to 1.98 in 2010 — and then watched it fall back to 1.79 by 2024 despite spending 3.5% of GDP annually on family policy, more than any other European nation.

The reasons are structural and well-documented. Women in developed economies have children later — the average age of first birth in Italy is now 31.6 years — which compresses the reproductive window. Housing costs consume 40-60% of young adult income in major European and Asian cities, according to OECD housing data. Childcare costs, even in countries with subsidies, average 15-30% of household income for families with young children. Labour markets increasingly demand advanced degrees and extended training periods. Cultural expectations around parenting have intensified: the average middle-class parent in 2024 spends three times as many hours per week on childcare as parents did in 1975, according to sociologist Patrick Ishizuka's research at Cornell University.

And then there is the question of whether people simply do not want large families anymore. Survey data from the European Social Survey suggests that desired family size has fallen across every European country since 1990. In 2022, the median Italian woman under 30 said she wanted 1.7 children — not 2.1, not 3, but a number already below replacement. The gap between desired and actual fertility is real but small: approximately 0.4 children per woman in most developed nations. This implies that even if policy removed every structural barrier to childbearing, fertility would rise to perhaps 1.6 — still catastrophically below replacement.

The Alternative No One Will Fund

There is, technically, a third path: radically restructure the welfare state to function with a smaller, older population. This would require raising retirement ages to 72 or 75, cutting pension benefits by 30-40%, shifting healthcare spending toward efficiency rather than access, and accepting lower economic growth as a permanent condition. Singapore has begun this transition. Its Central Provident Fund requires workers to save 37% of their salary for retirement — not pay into a collective system, but accumulate individual accounts. There are no unfunded liabilities because there are no promises that depend on future workers. The political cost has been tolerable because Singapore never had a generous pay-as-you-go system to dismantle.

Europe cannot replicate this. Its pension systems were designed as intergenerational contracts: current workers fund current retirees, based on the assumption that future workers will do the same. Breaking that contract is political suicide. In 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 — a modest two-year increase — and faced months of strikes, mass protests, and a collapse in approval ratings. Italy's last attempt at pension reform, in 2011, contributed directly to the fall of Silvio Berlusconi's government. No European politician has successfully campaigned on cutting retirement benefits. Several have ended their careers trying.

The Policy No One Will Name

Which brings us back to immigration — the one policy that actually works and that every governing party has decided to oppose. Canada's population has grown by 3.2% over the past two years, almost entirely through immigration, allowing it to maintain a dependency ratio of 2.9 workers per retiree. Australia has done the same. Both countries have functioning pension systems, growing economies, and political debates about immigration that are vicious but not yet suicidal.

The European case is more complex because the continent has already experienced large-scale immigration and has decided it does not want more. Germany accepted one million Syrian refugees in 2015; its reward was the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, now polling at 22% nationally. Sweden took 163,000 asylum seekers per capita in the same period and now has a government committed to "remigration." The backlash is real, the social tensions are real, and the political class has concluded that further immigration is electorally impossible.

But the arithmetic has not changed. Italy still needs 280,000 new workers per year. Spain needs 250,000. Germany needs 400,000, according to the Bertelsmann Stiftung's 2024 labour market analysis. These are not ambitious targets; they are the minimum required to prevent fiscal collapse. The alternative is not a stable low-immigration equilibrium. The alternative is Greece in 2010: pension cuts of 40%, youth unemployment at 50%, a lost decade of economic output, and mass emigration of the young people who remain — which, of course, worsens the dependency ratio further.

What Happens Next

So we are left with a situation in which every developed nation faces the same arithmetic, has access to the same research, and has chosen variations of the same incoherent response: claim that pro-natalist policy will solve the problem (it will not), promise to restrict immigration (which guarantees the problem worsens), and defer the fiscal reckoning to the next government. Japan has been playing this game for thirty years and now has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 264%. Italy is at 144% and rising. South Korea is at 50% but climbing faster than any OECD nation.

The end state is not hard to predict. Either these countries accept mass immigration — which their electorates currently oppose — or they accept lower living standards, higher taxes, later retirement, and reduced benefits. The politics of the former are ugly. The politics of the latter are impossible. Which means we will get neither a solution nor an honest debate, but rather a slow-motion fiscal crisis punctuated by symbolic family policies that cost billions and achieve nothing, alongside immigration restrictions that make the crisis worse while pretending to address voter concerns.

There is historical precedent for this too. In 1910, the French government, alarmed by Germany's higher birthrate, created the Commission on Depopulation and offered medals to mothers of large families. By 1940, France had been defeated in six weeks by a country with better tanks and better demographics. One cannot help but wonder if Italy's Bronze Medal for Prolific Families, revived in 2024, will prove more effective than the French version. The early returns suggest otherwise. Last year, 379,000 babies were born in Italy — the lowest number since the country was unified in 1861. The medals are quite handsome, though. That is something.