EU Pension Chief: Europe Needs 50 Million Immigrants by 2050 to Maintain Workforce

"The European demographic and its aging means that, if we want to keep the same number of active people in the economic machine, we will need 50 million so-called foreign population to balance the active population in 2050 in Europe." This is how Jean-Paul Delevoye, High Commissioner for Pensions, expressed himself in front of young people in Créteil.

For him, no politician is able to talk about immigration anymore because everyone is hysterical. "We are in a very unhealthy moment in our democracy where we are looking for a scapegoat: yesterday it was the Jew, today it is the Muslim, the day after tomorrow it will be someone else," said the former minister of Jacques Chirac.

These statements by Jean-Paul Delevoye, reported by Le Figaro, quickly provoked the ire of the right and the far right. In a tweet, Bruno Retailleau, leader of the LR senators, felt that it was "unworthy of a member of the government." For him, it is a "scandalous rhetoric." His regret, he will say, is that the government "preferred to encourage immigration rather than birth rate."

"Between the defense of the balance of pensions by massive immigration and the doubtful and unacceptable parallel between ’the Jew of yesterday and the Muslim of today’, Jean-Paul Delevoye is sowing trouble on a pension reform that is already in bad shape," LR deputy Eric Ciotti goes further. The president of the Rassemblement national, Marine Le Pen, called on voters to "wake up urgently and take their destiny in hand" in the face of government members who "have an immigrationist roadmap from which they will not change."

Reacting to the comments, Jean-Paul Delevoye regrets that his remarks were "taken out of context" and "misinterpreted by some."