China Refutes the Immigration Myth: Foreign Labor Not the Key to Western Growth
China is challenging the narrative that economic growth in the West hinges on immigrant labor—exposing the “big immigration lie”
There is a lie being told that millions of migrants are needed to revitalize Western economies, but one simple meme is enough to dispel this entire claim. The meme shows that there are fewer foreign nationals residing in all of China than in just one German city, Berlin.
A simple search confirms this astonishing statistic. According to China’s 2020 census, there were approximately 845,697 foreign nationals residing in the entire country — a country of 1.4 billion.
In contrast, Berlin alone, just one city in Germany, has over 1 million foreigners living in it. That does not even count all the people with German citizenship with a foreign background. One estimate put the share of people with an immigration background at 39.4 percent of the Berlin population, which would put the number close to 1.8 million in total.
Based on nonstop claims from not only the left but even the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), more and more migrants are needed to boost the German economy, despite these same migrants costing €50 billion a year in social benefits, integration, and housing. Notably, despite claims that these migrants would secure the German pension system when they first started arriving en masse in 2016, the government is now exploring plans to raise the retirement age to 73 by 2060.
The disconnect from reality is so extreme that the “open borders” ideology is clearly becoming more of a religious mantra than anything grounded in facts and data.
Germany is just one Western nation, but its rapid and ongoing decline tells the story of much of the West. German NGOs, left-wing activists, mainstream journalists, and various left-liberal parties and free marketers are looking on as Asian countries leapfrog German industry and make a laughing stock of its economy, all while eschewing mass migration entirely.
In fact, a large part of Asia’s strength is the fact that they have been highly restrictive when it comes to immigration. These Asian countries are not free of problems, but they feature safe cities, dominant manufacturing industries, and infrastructure projects that Germany and other European countries can now only dream of.
In China, and much of the rest of Asia, this is achieved with a native workforce, and even with falling birthrates, the native workforce is offering enormous benefits.
China, a green energy powerhouse
A recent Bloomberg article detailed how Western venture capitalists traveled to China to determine firsthand what threat — or opportunity — Chinese companies pose to the renewable and clean tech sectors.
This group of Western investors visited Chinese factories and told Bloomberg the shocking verdict, which is that Europeans and Americans are remarkably behind China in terms of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, battery technology, and hydrogen. In fact, so much so, that it is no longer even worth investing in Western startups focused in these areas.
Instead, these Western investors are choosing to work with, and invest in, Chinese firms. These same Chinese firms are entirely reliant on homegrown talent, and certainly are not importing millions of Indians, North Africans, and Middle Easterners to drive the amazing success they are seeing across nearly all industries.
One of the venture capitalists told Bloomberg: “it’s very clear that Western investors live in a bubble in their misconceptions about China.”
Bloomberg news further wrote that these venture capitalists “knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and ‘everything around energy,’ but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc who’s now a partner at Kompas VC.”
The media outlet continues, writing: “Planet A Ventures, a Berlin-based VC, has decided that investments in Western startups spanning battery manufacturing and recycling, electrolysers, solar and hardware for wind are no longer viable, says Nick de la Forge, general partner and co-founder of the firm. He says before the trip he’d suspected China was way ahead; but after going there, those sectors are now ‘strictly off the list.’”
Does China sound like a country that needs waves of foreign migrant labor to compete with the West?
Europe’s automobile industry is losing out
This reality is also playing out in Germany’s automobile sector, the crown jewel of the country.
Automobile production in Germany has declined dramatically over the past 10 years. In 2017, 5.7 million passenger cars were produced in Germany, while in 2024, this figure fell 29 percent to 4 million, according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (Cologne Institute). The analysis is based on data from the International Automobile Manufacturers Association (IAM).
Meanwhile, China is extending its lead over the EU and Germany, producing 30 percent more cars during the same period. In 2024, China produced 27.48 million cars, compared to only 21.08 million in 2015.
Many Europeans themselves are increasingly turning around and buying Chinese cars.
Remarkably, Germany has taken in 6 million foreigners during this time period, from 2015 to 2024, with many of these foreigners expected to fuel the German automobile sector. During this same time, China kept its borders remarkably shut.
Countries that refused to accept migrants, such as China, which also faces a growing aging population just like Germany, were supposed to be the big losers. Now, German institutions are releasing white papers urging German firms to copy China’s innovation success.
Key takeaways from a report by ITIF show that “Chinese automakers produce 21 percent of the world’s passenger vehicles—a figure analysts estimate will reach 33 percent by 2030— and as of 2022, they produced 62 percent of the world’s EVs and 77 percent of EV batteries. From 2020 to 2023, China’s global EV exports increased by 851 percent, with the largest share of those exports (nearly 40 percent) going to Europe.”
Asian firms are strong AI leaders (with almost zero immigration)
When it comes to the biggest industry of the future, despite record immigration to Germany, there is not a single AI firm of note in the entire country, a fact that the country’s press continuously bemoans. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently stated that the “Chinese market is home to 50 percent of the world’s AI researchers.”
Even the U.S. lead in AI is now being questioned, with the BBC just writing last week about “how China is challenging Nvidia’s AI chip dominance.” Chinese firms are increasingly producing their own AI chips and tech.
Again, how is China doing this without diversity? How is it doing with a 92 percent Han Chinese population and nearly zero foreign immigration? The left should start asking itself some hard questions.
Meanwhile, neighboring Taiwan remains the world’s top producer of AI chips for companies like Nvidia and AMD. Taiwan, an economic powerhouse in its own right, also features a highly anti-migrant set of policies that are often compared to Japan. Despite a population that is made up entirely of various Asian groups of mostly Han Chinese, the government is considering making its policies even more extreme, including a clampdown on naturalization rights.
Foreigners make up only 3.8 percent of the Taiwanese population. Additionally, many of the foreigners are spouses from Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Indonesia, which are not all that culturally dissimilar from Taiwan’s population.
In short, the immigration-restrictive countries of Asia seem to be leading the way in many areas of AI, manufacturing, green tech, and “cities of the future.”
Does Germany need more immigrants? It appears to be mass-firing its own workers
It is just a reality that the high-skilled industries that once fueled the German economy are not only faltering, but they are not even necessarily looking for new employees. Instead, they are shedding them at a rapid pace.
In the last 12 months, German firms have announced huge layoffs, including 35,000 at Volkswagen, 40,000 at Mercedes, 7,500 at Audi, 5,000 at Daimler Truck, 14,000 at ZF Group, and Bosch just announced 22,000 layoffs.
If anything, German firms are increasingly not hiring, in large part due to AI advances making new roles obsolete. A commentary from NIUS details this ongoing process.
“Because more and more companies in Germany are switching to automation and AI. This means that positions will be eliminated or vacant positions will simply no longer be filled — because AI takes over the jobs. At the same time, this is a ticking time bomb for the German social and pension system: more and more people are retiring, fewer and fewer people are paying into the system – because AI takes over the job but does not pay social security contributions,” writes Andreas Moring.
He warns that “while politicians continue to say that immigration is intended to solve the problems of the shortage of skilled workers in the labor market, German companies are heading in a completely different direction. They are using more and more artificial intelligence to automate work that humans previously did. To achieve this, massive job cuts are being made. And many more positions are not even filled or created. However, this is not an issue for the government of Merz and Klingbeil. It is a ticking time bomb for the German social system.”
While German firms are not developing much of the AI technology of the future, they are certainly using these tools to automate their workforces. In short, many of the immigrants arriving in Germany are not necessarily going to be needed.
Yet, left-wing parties and the CDU are still participating in this mirage, because it is core to their ideology.
“While all left-wing parties in Germany, but also the Union, are still telling the story that immigration is necessary because of demographic change, companies in Germany are switching work from people to AI. More and more companies in Germany understand that immigration is of practically no use to them in terms of the shortage of skilled workers and the need for personnel,” writes Moring.
This is not just the opinion of Moring, but even the position of what many consider the leading asset management firm in the world, BlackRock.
Here is what famed CEO Larry Fink had to say earlier this year about Asia and its “xenophobic” immigration policies. He notes the AI revolution will be far easier for Asian societies to absorb and adapt to.
“You know, we always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking unemployment, excuse me, shrinking demographics. These countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology. And if the promise, I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but as a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries and the standard of living of individuals even with shrinking populations,” said Fink.
“And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing. And the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations,” he added.
Certainly, many of the skilled positions of the past will be filled with robotics, automation, and AI, alleviating the need for more foreign immigrants to enter Europe. This is a reality that many politicians do not even want to discuss, let alone acknowledge, even in their own heads.
Engineering and Infrastructure
If the students of today are the economy of tomorrow, then the situation in Europe is set to become even worse.
China continues to outperform Germany in the PISA rankings and is now innovating more than Germany. It is also pursuing more and more daring engineering feats, even when a country like Germany, once renowned for its own engineering prowess, faces humiliation over projects like the Stuttgart 21 rail project. That project originally was supposed to be completed for €1.5 billion and has now ballooned to more than €11 billion, and is still not completed.
China’s rail system has vastly leapfrogged Germany’s system, including high-speed trains.
The more diverse Germany became, the bigger the economic output and the more dynamic the economy. At least, that was the theory. However, it appears that the more diversity that occurs, the more stagnant Europe’s economy becomes and the more social tensions, crime, and a faltering education system become the reality. All the experts across the board are warning that the future high-skilled labor Europe needs to survive is certainly not being produced in Europe’s increasingly dysfunctional education system, where students often enter classes without even speaking more than a few words of the native language.
Certainly, more Uber drivers and a race to the bottom on wages will not translate to a rosier economic outlook in Europe.
Even in areas like healthcare, where human labor is still needed in many areas, there were always alternative solutions to bringing in millions of people with vastly different cultures. A mandatory social year of work for young people in nursing homes, more AI and automated solutions (such as seen in Japan), and better pay could all massively improve the situation. In addition, tighter conditions for social benefits could still push many into these fields. In fact, these solutions are still on the table.
Reality does not matter
It is perhaps time for the West to rethink the entire basis for its open borders policies, but of course, there is a religious movement behind this belief. No amount of facts, figures, or statistics is going to dissuade these people. Not only is the left’s political power wrapped up in this belief, but diversity and mass immigration are core to their very identity and drive their feeling of moral superiority to anyone who questions it.
In many ways, the EU is looking to take the restrictive path of China, just not on immigration. That means a clampdown on democracy and increasing surveillance — all without even being able to complete a railway project on time. European countries with the highest levels of immigration are now seeing the social fabric tear at the seams, as seen in countries like Germany.
The EU and Berlin’s solution? Just cancel democracy altogether, all while claiming to protect democracy. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is challenging the tenets and ideological assumptions of the German ruling class to such an extent that their only solution is to ban the party.
The reality is they cannot fix the problems they created, and in Germany, they cannot bear the idea that the AfD and all of those “bad people” could ever be right. So, their solution is to censor, to ban, to ostracize, and so long as their world is protected — via private schools, upscale neighborhoods, and enough disposable income — they will fight for their ideology tooth and nail, even if their ideology costs them everything in the end.
Meanwhile, expect China to continue to move from strength to strength, as, despite its problems, it features an educated, dynamic, and cohesive society that Europe increasingly is unable to compete with.
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