Norway needs more immigration

The US president is well underway to infuriate the research sector. Now some of the world's top scientists are looking for new places to take root. Get them to Norway by promising competitive pay and good research conditions. That would probably be the best single measure we can do to increase our competitiveness.

Yet we don't. We have not understood the need to make Norway a leading research nation in areas that are strategically important to us and to ensure that Norway has a highly skilled workforce from foreigners. If we do not turn around quickly, it will be severely punished in the time to come.

The global battle for skilled labour will get fiercer in the next few decades. Norway is not alone in having an ageing population. Fewer people of working age will have to care for more and more elderly people.

But it's not just in the health and care sector that we need manpower. A lightning-fast technological development, especially related to artificial intelligence, will push Norway further into the knowledge economy. Taking advantage of these developments requires a significant boost in skills.

A clear finding from the research, is that investments in research and development are among the most profitable investments we can make. But the usefulness of investment in the research sector is limited to the quality of the research sprouts. We need help from abroad.

Anyone who is concerned about Norway's post-oil competitiveness and how the welfare state will survive in the face of the elderly wave should be able to agree on the following main priority in the time ahead: Making Norway a much more attractive place for migrant workers with the qualifications Norway needs.

Such a strategy should exploit extraordinary events, such as Trump's harakiri. But we also need a long-term strategy, like this Mats Kirkebirkeland in Civita have advocated. Such a strategy should include everything from building new English-language, technology-heavy courses and educational institutions, removing the tuition fee for international students, streamlining the immigration process for people with the skills Norway needs, marketing Norway abroad and entering into mutual residency agreements with countries with sought-after labour.

It is fond of saying that we cannot solve our long-term problems with immigration because immigrants will also one day grow old and need care and pensions. Then you overlook the fact that highly skilled labor is mobile. The main problem with academics and technologists is not that they stay too long in Norway, but that they leave too early.

More importantly, high-skill immigration has a significant multiplier effect. We attract the right people, it raises the level of the existing workforce. You don't see this if you stare blindly at the immigration accounts.

It may seem futile in the current political climate to get people to agree to increase immigration. But all immigration is not equally unpopular. There's a difference between a refugee family and a professor from the US. While it may not be popular now, we're going to see times shift as people realise we don't have a choice. Other strategies no longer work.

Martin Bech Holte, for example, has proposed cutting all income tax and funding the guild by cutting 300 billion in the public sector. The suggestion is refreshing. A lower income tax would make it more attractive to work. It would have made us richer and prevented outside exploration at the same time.

But Bech Holte's recipe comes fifteen years too late. Since the financial crisis, politicians have spent as good as all the oil money on boosting the public sector Rather than reducing the tax burden for most people. They shouldn't have done that. The oil money should have been spent on tax breaks and investments that benefit both us and future generations.

But it doesn't help to be hindsight. The question now is what we should do in the next fifteen years, not what we should have done in the preceding fifteen years. And when we look forward, not backward, we see that this is not the time for big tax breaks. Every fifth penny to the public sector goes to health and care, and every third worker works there. As care needs increase, the public sector must also increase. In addition, we will increase support for the Armed Forces.

A naive liberalist will think that we can solve our problems by privatising the health and care sector. It reduces the size of the public sector, but it doesn't make us richer. It shifts the cost burden from the state to the individuals -- and at worst, it makes us poorer. There is some cost control in state health priorities. If you let people decide for themselves how much they want to spend on health and care services in older days, you should see that demand is bottomless.

Another proposal from the bourgeois side, is to squeeze more out of people of working age by reducing sick pay and tightening up on the pension payments of those who leave work early. It is supposed to get people “out of bed” and delay emigration to the Canary Islands. But even if there is something to be gained, especially by make it costly for office workers with high skills to retire early, financial incentives will struggle to catch up with major cultural trends favoring leisure time over working hours.

The residual labour force of Norwegians is nothing compared to what we can get from immigrants hungry to succeed in their new country. A first step is to take advantage of the opportunity offered by many world-leading scientists looking for new pastures. Norway should take advantage of that.

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