…

Rafaela Dancygier, a political scientist at Princeton University, studies the politics of immigration and integration, including what fuels the rise of anti-immigrant far-right parties. She has found that many of the areas in Europe where anti-immigration politics are on the rise share certain characteristics: They have aging populations, fewer workers and fewer children.

“When people talk about the aging of populations in general, they refer to this as a nationwide phenomenon,” she said in an interview. “And that’s of course true. But then there are some areas in countries, often outside of cities, where that’s already just extremely pronounced. Because the young people are leaving, working-age people are leaving.”

…

The process, she said, goes something like this: As areas depopulate, the state tends to pull back its services from the region. Schools close because there are fewer children. Trains and bus lines get canceled, or are less frequent. Hospitals shut down. It is a local version of the kind of strain that aging countries will face on a national level if there are fewer workers to support more retirees.

That makes life more difficult in practical ways, she said, but there is also a psychological effect: People feel neglected and undervalued by the political elite.

Far-right parties “are very good at detecting the problem and playing on the grievances of voters who live in these areas,” she said. But these parties don’t offer realistic solutions to the problems of demographic decline. Instead, they scapegoat immigrants, blaming asylum-seekers and other foreigners for the region’s problems.

Non-paywall link