The EU needs a million migrants annually to compensate for the demographic deficit

European Commissioner for Internal Affairs Ylva Johansson said that the European Union (EU) needs a million migrants every year to compensate for the demographic deficit, as reports EUobserver.

According to her, the working-age population in the EU is decreasing by about a million every year.

"That means legal migration has to grow by about one million a year, and itʼs a really tough challenge to do that in an orderly way," she added.

Currently, about 3.5 million migrants arrive legally in the EU every year, and about 300 000 illegally.

The European Commission predicts that without migration, the working-age population of the EU would fall from 334 million in 2014 to around 238 million in 2060.

• The European Union is preparing a new migration policy, which Hungary and Poland oppose. In June 2023, EU interior ministers reached a preliminary agreement on proposed provisions for the establishment of a new system of "mandatory solidarity". This should give countries three options on what to do with migrants: accept them on their territory, pay €20 000 for each rejected applicant, or fund other states that are spent on asylum seekers. Budapest and Warsaw demanded that any steps related to migration reform be made by "consensus" and only on a "voluntary basis," regardless of an agreement.