Meloni knows that immigration and fertility are linked

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist.

Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate.

On the first of these, the small boat migrants, Italy is in deep trouble. Already this year, nearly as many illegal migrants have arrived there by sea as arrived in Britain from France in the whole of 2022. Earlier this month, Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency. The talk is of up to 900,000 migrant sea arrivals from Tunisia if its crisis-torn dictatorship collapses, and a further 685,000 in Libya ready to cross. That would be a catastrophe, not just for Italy but for Europe and for Britain.

On the second, what Meloni calls the slow suicide of Europe, Italy is in even deeper trouble. Italy was once world-famous for the phrase ‘Mamma mia!’ and for the women who until the 1970s produced huge numbers of bambini even though they were poor. Now it has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at 1.2 births per woman. In 2022, it recorded a new historic low – only 392,600 births, down from 400,249 the previous year, the 14th consecutive yearly fall. Since 2014 Italy’s population has fallen by about 1.4 million. Demographers predict that it will collapse from 59 million to 47.7 million by 2070. Britain’s fertility at 1.6 is far healthier than Italy’s, but it’s not great either and still well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Nearly all economists agree that a declining population is fatal economically.

These two issues, boats and births, are inextricably intertwined.