The Post-Holiday Daydream
Holidays are over, the beaches are just a memory, and reality is back with a thud. Every September, millions of us ask the same wistful question: why can’t life always be like this? Why not move somewhere sunny, with cheap wine and great food?
The newspapers know this seasonal mood well. Like clockwork, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail run stories about Brits moving abroad, often with a nudge-wink suggestion: “Leave behind immigration in the UK… by becoming an immigrant somewhere else.”
And every year one story stands out — the Italian village house for €1.
The €1 House Fantasy
The premise is irresistible: swap your dreary semi in Croydon for a crumbling but romantic pile in Sicily, all for the price of a packet of crisps. Of course, the fine print always ruins the dream. Renovations cost tens of thousands. Buyers are often obliged to live in the village for a certain number of days a year. And since Brexit, Brits can’t stay in the EU for more than six months at a stretch.
But behind the gimmick lies a serious issue: Italy’s shrinking population. With one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, rural towns are emptying out. Those €1 homes are really just bribes to attract residents back.
The Cost of an Ageing Population
Italy is an extreme example of a wider problem facing almost every wealthy nation. Falling birth rates and longer life expectancies create an ageing population that puts immense strain on public finances. Pension bills rise, health costs climb, and fewer workers are left to pay the taxes that fund it all.
The simple truth is this: the only way to sustain welfare systems in ageing societies is through immigration. More people of working age, earning, spending, and paying taxes.
The Immigrants Italy Doesn’t Want
Here’s the irony. There are plenty of people who want to move to Italy — enough to fill those empty villages and prop up the economy. But they don’t tend to be retirees from Surrey. They come from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They arrive as asylum seekers, refugees, or economic migrants, often desperate to work hard and build new lives.
And instead of welcoming them, Italy spends millions each year on patrols, detention centres, and policies designed to keep them out. When migrants do arrive, they’re treated harshly — even as the country begs for someone, anyone, to rescue its abandoned towns.
Cheap Houses, Expensive Politics
This is the terrible logic of an ageing population and immigration. Pensioners expect generous benefits, yet many of them vote for parties promising to keep their countries frozen in time — whiter, smaller, closed off to outsiders. It’s a contradiction that can’t last.
Money flows to where it gets the best return. Goods flow to where there are buyers. And people, inevitably, move to where the opportunities are. No wall or naval patrol will ever change that.
Spain, and the Future of Rich Countries
Some countries have already accepted this reality. Spain, for example, has quietly become one of the most immigrant-friendly destinations in Europe. It recognises that replenishing its workforce is not optional — it’s the only way to secure prosperity.
The future belongs to those who stop treating immigration as a threat, and start seeing it for what it is: the lifeline for ageing economies. Without it, the €1 house becomes a metaphor not for opportunity, but for decline.
SEO key phrase used: ageing population and immigration
Suggested slug/URL: /cheap-houses-expensive-politics-italy-ageing-population-immigration
Do you want me to push this a bit harder in the conclusion — maybe tie it back to the UK more explicitly, so it doesn’t just feel like an “Italy problem”?
You said:
yes please
ChatGPT said:
Perfect — here’s the revised version with a harder, UK-facing conclusion.
Cheap Houses, Expensive Politics: Italy, Ageing Populations and Immigration
The Post-Holiday Daydream
Holidays are over, the beaches are just a memory, and reality is back with a thud. Every September, millions of us ask the same wistful question: why can’t life always be like this? Why not move somewhere sunny, with cheap wine and great food?
The newspapers know this seasonal mood well. Like clockwork, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail run stories about Brits moving abroad, often with a nudge-wink suggestion: “Leave behind immigration in the UK… by becoming an immigrant somewhere else.”
And every year one story stands out — the Italian village house for €1.
The €1 House Fantasy
The premise is irresistible: swap your dreary semi in Croydon for a crumbling but romantic pile in Sicily, all for the price of a packet of crisps. Of course, the fine print always ruins the dream. Renovations cost tens of thousands. Buyers are often obliged to live in the village for a certain number of days a year. And since Brexit, Brits can’t stay in the EU for more than six months at a stretch.
But behind the gimmick lies a serious issue: Italy’s shrinking population. With one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, rural towns are emptying out. Those €1 homes are really just bribes to attract residents back.
The Cost of an Ageing Population
Italy is an extreme example of a wider problem facing almost every wealthy nation. Falling birth rates and longer life expectancies create an ageing population that puts immense strain on public finances. Pension bills rise, health costs climb, and fewer workers are left to pay the taxes that fund it all.
The simple truth is this: the only way to sustain welfare systems in ageing societies is through immigration. More people of working age, earning, spending, and paying taxes.
The Immigrants Italy Doesn’t Want
Here’s the irony. There are plenty of people who want to move to Italy — enough to fill those empty villages and prop up the economy. But they don’t tend to be retirees from Surrey. They come from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They arrive as asylum seekers, refugees, or economic migrants, often desperate to work hard and build new lives.
And instead of welcoming them, Italy spends millions each year on patrols, detention centres, and policies designed to keep them out. When migrants do arrive, they’re treated harshly — even as the country begs for someone, anyone, to rescue its abandoned towns.
Cheap Houses, Expensive Politics
This is the terrible logic of an ageing population and immigration. Pensioners expect generous benefits, yet many of them vote for parties promising to keep their countries frozen in time — whiter, smaller, closed off to outsiders. It’s a contradiction that can’t last.
Money flows to where it gets the best return. Goods flow to where there are buyers. And people, inevitably, move to where the opportunities are. No wall or naval patrol will ever change that.
What It Means for Britain
Britain isn’t immune to this logic. We have our own ageing population, a shrinking birth rate, and a health and care system groaning under the strain. And yet our politics is dominated by promises to “cut immigration.”
The same readers who daydream about €1 houses in Tuscany often rail against migrants arriving in Dover. But the truth is brutally simple: if we want pensions paid, hospitals staffed, and our economy to keep ticking, we need immigrants too.
The rich countries of the future are those, like Spain, that face up to this fact. Those that don’t will find themselves staring not at a sunny Mediterranean dream, but at the boarded-up reality of decline.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/elderly-population.html
Anyone who has studied international economics will have heard of the Impossible Trinity: in which the global economy can have any two of the following three desirable characteristics:
1. Fixed exchange rates,
2. Free movement of capital across borders, or
3. National sovereignty over monetary policy.
The pre-1914 gold standard era had 1 and 2 but not 3, the Bretton-Woods era had 1 and 3 but not 2, while the “Washington Consensus” era had 2 and 3 but not 1.
Aren’t nations though also bound by a demographic Impossible Trinity, in which they can only have at most two of the following 3 desirable demographic characteristics (unless they have mass emigration of the elderly, and which other country would be willing to take them?):
1. A high life expectancy,
2. A stable or falling population, or
3. An adequate number of workers to sustain the retired population.
This is true irrespective of how many of the population is native-born versus foreign-born, and is likely especially important in countries like the UK where a lot of anti-immigration sentiment is
Sorry, I meant for the final paragraph to be:
This is true irrespective of how many of the population is native-born versus foreign-born, and is likely especially important in countries like the UK where a lot of anti-immigration sentiment is motivated by a feeling that the country is overpopulated rather than by concern for the population’s ethnic make-up.
(Of course Irish racists have recently popularized the #IrelandIsFull hashtag on social media, even though it is obviously utterly ludicrous in a way that #EnglandIsFull wouldn’t be!)
Many people (other than those pining for a less populous country in general, as I alluded to in my earlier replies: I think they may be more common in the UK than other European countries thanks to our heritage of settler colonialism) don’t so much want to prevent immigration in general, but rather to prevent immigration by specific demographics which they perceive as undesirable.
In Europe the two main immigrant groups that are widely seen as undesirable are Muslims (especially those from the Islamic heartland: roughly those lands that were formerly part of the Umayyad and/or Abbasid caliphates and are still Muslim-majority today) and black Africans.
Black Africans are seen as undesirable because they’re seen as being low-IQ, as well as for the sheer number of potential immigrants involved (as Africa is now by far the world’s most fertile continent), while Muslims are seen as undesirable for multiple reasons. One of course is the millennium-long history of enmity between Europe and the Islamic world: indeed ancient Greece and Rome saw themselves as Mediterranean rather than European civilizations, with European civilization only emerging as a concept once the Mediterranean became a fault-line betwen “Ave Maria” and “Allahu Akbar”.
Another is that while the Catholic Church in medieval Europe outlawed cousin marriage, in Arab culture a man’s father’s brother’s daughter (which actually has a special name “bint al-‘amm” in Arabic) came to be seen as an especially favourable woman to marry. While this custom likely emerged in the Levant during the century before Muhammad was born, it was spread throughout the greater Middle East by the Islamic conquests. Many of the most distasteful characteristics of Middle Eastern Muslim societies even today are likely rooted in these marriage practices: forced marriages, honour killings and seclusion of women within their homes. It also splinters society into clans whose members are very closely related, which likely explains why it emerged in the first place: in a society of goat herders (for example) it would be advantageous to be able to form a very tight-knit “band of brothers” to defend the herd against thieves.
For anyone seeking to build a modern nation-state however this kind of family structure is pure poison: it’s likely (along with the rise of rentier petrostates) why there are almost no democracies in the Arab world, as democracy assumes the individual rather than the extended family is the basic political unit. Note for example how Saddam Hussein’s former Iraqi regime was made up overwhelmingly of members of his own clan based in Tikrit. It’s also why Arab armies were so inept that they couldn’t even defeat itty-bitty Israel.
It seems there may be a more general global problem in that there are almost no cultures that are both well-adapted to be productive within a 21st-century economy, and also above-replacement in their fertility. If we look away from Muslims we can note that ultra-Orthodox Jews and (in the US) Mormons tend to live on welfare, while Roma and Irish Travellers parasitize the communities they live among by begging and theft. The only high-fertility subculture in rich countries that isn’t parasitic in this way are the Amish, although their intentionally low-tech lifestyle arguably wastes land that could be used far more productively: it’s likely why they’re found in the relatively sparsely populated United States.
Not sure I agree with that. Cousin marriage isn’t just a Muslim thing. It was very common in the British (and lots of other) Royal families, and is still legal in most Conservative states in the US.
Arranged marriages and honour killings are big problems in Hindu and Sikh communities, in fact the only times I have encountered arranged marriages is among UK Hindus. They have just as many reactionary and repressive rules about women, and honour killings if anything are a bigger problem
And did you really mean to say that ultra-orthodx jews live on welfare and Roma are parasites? I can’t possibly endorse those views
My point wasn’t about cousin marriage in general but about the specific father’s-brother’s-daughter (FBD) form of it: this is by far the most harmful form of cousin marriage (especially when practised over multiple generations) both genetically and in terms of splintering societies into self-contained clans.
And that form of cousin marriage is practically unique to the greater Middle East up to and including Pakistan: the only people from outside this region to practice it (in the past) were the Tswana in southern Africa.
(I may be wrong though, and it seems like an ideal check for whether FBD marriage is a specific problem would be to see if Pakistanis in Britain were more problematic in any respect than Bangladeshis: both are Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, but Pakistanis often practice FBD marriage while Bangladeshis almost never do.)
As for ultra-Orthodox Jews: aren’t their men (at least) widely stereotyped in Israel as reading the Torah instead of working?