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Migration is one of the most contentious topics across the world right now. The collapse of globalisation, multipolarity, and competition for resources is making all of us a tad more tribalistic than we’ve gotten used to over the last 50 years.
So far, ideologues on the political left and political right have argued about benefits to growth [1], the threats to social cohesion and welfare [2], and engaged in every single unhinged variation of the 2004 “Goobacks” episode of South Park. All in all, everyone is talking about their migration policies, and what they need to do to move forward.
Comparatively, outside of fringe publications, the discourse on policies of net emigrant countries has been pretty meek. Even in cases where the topic is broached, the conversation stops at brain drain, repatriation policies, and the contribution remittances make to national budgets.
While those are valid conversations, I think they don’t do enough to tackle the root issue:
Who pays to produce a worker and who benefits from their labour?
In this article, I want to look at two parts of the answer: the transfer, the stock of human capital paid in one place and consumed in another, and the ratchet, what the transfer does, year after year, to the people who stayed.
The reserve army
Marx theorisedEngels originally came up with the term “Reserve Army of Labour” in his 1845 book, “The Condition of the Working Class in England” that the unemployed and underemployed are a necessary part of the capitalist organisation of work. A “reserve army” of labourers living in precarious conditions both keeps wages down, and acts as a disciplining factor for current workers.
Big industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., when the overpopulation is the greatest. Overpopulation is therefore in the interest of the bourgeoisie, and it gives the workers good advice which it knows to be impossible to carry out. Since capital only increases when it employs workers, the increase of capital involves an increase of the proletariat, and, as we have seen, according to the nature of the relation of capital and labour, the increase of the proletariat must proceed relatively even faster.
While there is some debate about the mechanics that Marx employs above, the general consensus is that unemployment does have a negative pressure on wages. [3]
Now, Marx’ reserve army is produced inside the society that uses it. Handing out welfare cheques is the cost paid for reaping the benefits of the reserve army. Within a state, both the cost and benefit are part of the same balance sheet. This makes it a class relation rather than a geographic one, with a classic remedy: organise and make the reserve too expensive to maintain.
Free movement, however, severs that. The wage-disciplining effect lands in Munich, but the cost was paid in Iași. The people bearing the cost and the ones receiving the benefit no longer share a state or ballot.
In the context of aging populations, a labour shortage is capital’s problem, not ours, given a supply-side squeeze on labour would actually push wages up. Similarly, in a pay-as-you-go economy, it is also the pension system’s problem.French pensioners now outearn the median working-age adult. The UK is on track to spend more on state pensions than any other welfare combined. Except that importing contributors doesn’t fix the ratio, but merely defers it. Arriving workers that remain and retire also need contributors of their own, therefore each cohort of imports creates the demand for the next, never fully closing the deficit.
Diapers to taxpayer
Concretely, a worker who arrives at 25 is basically pre-paid: 18 years of schooling, healthcare, and maybe even a state-funded degree. Romania funds the medical training, Germany or the UK gets the doctor.
Between 2021 and 2025 alone, over 6,000 Romanian doctors requested certificates to work abroad [4]. A decade after EU accession, the Romanian Ministry of Health estimates that there have been over 43,000 departures from the healthcare field, which cost the Romanian government approx. €770 million in training costs [5]. At roughly €20,000 a head this figure is the floor, rather than a full accounting of what six years of medical education actually costs the state.
That it is a floor is itself the point. National accounts book education spending as “current government spending”, not investment in an asset, and definitionally, there’s no balance sheet from which the asset is seen to leave. The transfer is unmeasurable, by construction, using conventions written before free movement existed. Why this matters is that every public argument about who subsidises whom inside the EU is conducted on the ledger that does exist. Structural funds, cohesion payments, and the RRF are all counted, published, and deployed politically to demonstrate net flows east. And the RRF rulebook bars recurring expenditure. Meaning you can build the hospital wing with RRF funds, but you cannot pay the anaesthetist who would work in it. The money arrives in a form that is structurally incapable of substituting for the thing that left.
Moreover, the same institutional architecture that guarantees the qualification recognition that enables a doctor’s exit also runs the excessive deficit procedure that forbids Romania from raising the salary that might have retained her.
The obligations don’t leave with the people
So far, this is a one-off. If that was the whole story it would be an injustice with a price tag. It isn’t, because the state she left does not get to shrink.
A state pays accrued pension entitlements, manages the public healthcare estate, services debt, and, in the EU, abides by the deficit path. Emigration removes contributions. It does not remove a single obligation, and shifts the ratio between the two in one direction only.
In 2015, Romania’s contributors-to-pensioners ratio was 1.05, by 2024, this fell to 0.88. In terms of healthcare, 6 million contributors pay for more than 16 million beneficiaries. Pension spending already exceeds 9% of GDP and projected toward 12% by 2035 [6].
Romania’s revenue structure makes this maximally painful. Income tax is a flat 10%, CAS is 25% of gross, uncapped, plus CASS on top, also uncapped. State revenue is almost a linear function of the wage bill of of people aged 25 to 60, precisely the cohort that leaves. Roughly a third of the Romanian working age population resides abroad [7] This is precisely the slice of the population the entire revenue model rests on.
The instruments available to close the gap are all visible in the 2025 Bolojan budget package, and every one of them is a bill sent to the people that stayed:
- standard VAT up to 21% from 19%
- food, medicine, books, firewood, district heating went up due to reduced VAT rates merged into a single 11% band
- excise duties on fuel
- new 10% health contribution on pensions above RON 3,000
- sick-leave replacement cut to 55% for the first week
- public wages and pensions frozen at November 2024 levels for a second year, in the context of a 5.72% inflation rate
The list above excludes any instrument that reaches the person who left. Emigrant income is taxed where it is earned. The tax base becomes permanently unreachable, by design of the same treaty framework that produced the shortfall in the first place.
Why it doesn’t settle
Most collective action problems have diminishing returns to defection. The more people take the shortcut, the worse the shortcut gets: congestion, overfishing, queue-jumping. Defection is self-limiting, which is why those systems settle somewhere, however badly.
This one runs the other way. Each departure raises the burden on the remainder, which raises the payoff to the next departure. Higher VAT, higher contributions, frozen public wages, fewer doctors, worse hospitals. Staying becomes more expensive and leaving more attractive.
The right analogy is a bank run, where the value of withdrawing rises with the number of prior withdrawals, and where every individual decision is correct at the moment it is taken. Nobody in it is behaving badly, the anaesthetist who leaves for Bavaria is doing what you or I would also do, given the context.
A couple of things follow: moralising about emigration, a cultural divide between the diaspora and locals, and patriotic appeals to return. The Romanian far right have used aesthetics of longing for return as a beach-head for gaining sympathy across the Romanian diaspora
The solution here isn’t shaming the people that left. None of this is an argument against people leaving, or apologia for Ceaușescu-era exit bans. The argument is against a settlement in which one party capitalises the worker and another realises the return.
What money can’t buy back
All of the above is denominated in money, which makes it the half that can be argued about and, for the same reason, the half that can be dismissed. Romania has survied worse arithmetic. The loss that appears in none of those numbers is the one that matters more.
Diana Sabu cleans houses in France. Her eight-year-old son, Edi, is being raised by his grandmother in Romania. She told the Guardian that she would come back tomorrow if a job at home paid enough “to live without fear of tomorrow” [8].
Someone who leaves at 25 and returns as 60, if at all, is gone for exactly the years in which they would have joined a union, struck, stood for a local council, or fought over a wage agreement. Remittances can replace the income, but nothing replaces the presence.
And the absence is self-sealing. Dissatisfaction has two outlets: exit, or organising. When leaving is cheap, dissatisfaction discharges as exit, and the political pressure that would have forced improvement never forms.
What remains is an electorate that is older, more rural, and more dependent on transfers, with a significant fraction of households drawing income from abroad. That household whose income does not depend on domestic policy has structurally less reason to demand better domestic policy.
The result isn’t apathy as a character flaw. It is the predictable politics of a population whose most reform-motivated members have been continuously removed for twenty years, and whose remainder has a rational interest in the continuation of transfers rather than in growth. The system has a name. Patronage is what a political order optimises for when the constituency for anything else has emigrated.
The three options, reiterated
From where I stand, there are three options ahead, but only one of those options is desireable.
Raising the return for staying is blocked by the excessive deficit procedure. Lowering the return to leaving is unavailable under free movement, and besides that, undesireable We’re not implementing exit bans here .
The only remaining option is also the most unglamorous one. Price in the sending state’s training costs, from diapers to taxpayer.
Concretely, let recovery and cohesion money fund recurring costs. Price the training cost into the mutual recognition of qualifications rather than granting it for free.
Burnham commenting on small boats, Germany turning people back at the border, are all arguments about who gets let in. None of them is an argument about who paid to raise the people being let in.
The periphery currently holds no instrument in that debate, and no seat at the table. What it has is the thing that keeps producing: people, raised at its own expense, delivered on request.
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