Brussels Builds Continued Immigration Into Europe’s Future
The EU formally acknowledges immigration as the primary solution to declining birth rates, with fertility at 1.34 children per woman and 4.2 million non-EU immigrants arriving last year.
The European Commission’s Demography Report 2026 presents a Europe rapidly ageing, with plummeting fertility and a shrinking working-age population, as The European Conservative reports. Rather than prioritizing policies to reverse native demographic collapse, EU institutions appear focused on managing decline—with mass immigration cast as the solution.
In 2024, just 3.55 million children were born across the EU, less than half the 6.8 million born in 1964. The fertility rate has crashed to 1.34 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to sustain a stable population without migration. Since 2012, annual deaths have exceeded births every year. When the EU’s population has grown at all, immigration has been the sole cause.
Last year, 4.2 million immigrants from non-EU countries entered the bloc, while 1.6 million departed EU territory. As of early 2025, 46.7 million foreign-born residents lived within the Union, representing 10.4% of the total population.
The report does not project the trajectory of the native-born population separately, but makes clear that Europeans of native origin are losing demographic weight as they fail to reproduce at rates sufficient to counterbalance ageing and mortality.
Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, has embedded continued immigration into all its population projections through 2100. The central scenario assumes net immigration every single year for the rest of the century. The modeling further assumes that as the working-age population contracts, immigration will automatically increase to compensate—adding inflows equal to 10% of each annual workforce decline.
Without net immigration, Eurostat projects the EU would have roughly 130 million fewer inhabitants by 2100 compared to its baseline scenario.
Birth Rate Recovery Not Considered Realistic
What stands out most starkly is the report’s implicit assumption that restoring native birth rates to replacement level is not a credible policy goal. The document promotes legal migration as a remedy for labor shortages, endorses recruitment agreements with third countries, and highlights plans for an online platform linking European companies with foreign workers.
Low fertility, by contrast, is framed as largely beyond the reach of government intervention—a challenge Europe must simply adapt to rather than overcome.
In other words, reversing the native demographic collapse is not Brussels’ main priority. That is the fundamental choice embedded in the report.
Europe could pursue far more ambitious pro-family policies to enable young people to marry, secure housing, and raise children. Instead, the Commission is placing its faith in immigration, labor force participation increases, and productivity gains.
A historic transformation of Europe’s population composition is being presented as a technical adjustment, even though immigration volumes remain a matter of political choice, not demographic inevitability.
With information from The European Conservative
