The ‘International Migration Outlook 2013’ report of the OECD looks, inter alia, at the fiscal impact of migration for European OECD countries and for Australia, Canada and the United States. The study suggests that the impact of the cumulative waves of migration (that have arrived over the past 50 years in OECD countries) is on average close to zero, rarely exceeding 0.5% of GDP in either positive or negative terms. The impact is highest in Switzerland and Luxembourg, where immigrants provide an estimated net benefit of about 2% of GDP to the public purse. It seems that some countries are more successful than others in integrating immigrants into their labour markets. While in the UK, for instance, proportionately only slightly more immigrants are unemployed than natives, in Spain, Greece, Belgium and Sweden there is a gap of 10 percentage points or more.
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