The novel coronavirus pandemic taught the world three things: money invested in public healthcare pays huge dividends in terms of social and economic resilience; government deficit spending to support economic performance is better than seeing the destruction of human and physical capital; and some of the least attractive and least well-remunerated jobs are nevertheless “essential” for the functioning of society. Europe's political leaders were quick to recognize these “truths” as manifest. The first major European lending programme targeted national health systems; the second targeted national employment protection schemes; and all the while European leaders celebrated their societies’ “frontline workers”. Now everyone in Europe is looking ahead to the double challenge of planning for recovery and resilience because meeting that challenge is critical for Europe's next generation. Where European integration looked to be stumbling in the aftermath of the last crisis, particularly following the British referendum, now the European project has a powerful narrative behind it.

The question Peo Hansen asks is whether that new narrative is powerful enough to overturn deeply rooted misconceptions shared among Europeans about the financial cost of refugees and asylum seekers. These are people who come to Europe by necessity rather than out of choice. When they arrive, they are usually prevented from seeking employment until their applications for asylum can be processed. By implication, they receive “benefits” in the form of food, lodging, healthcare and education long before they are able to pay taxes. Once those applications are processed, those who are accepted enter the workforce wherever they can find a job – which often means doing unskilled or semi-skilled labour in the public or private sector. Because those jobs tend not to pay high wages, these refugees tend not to pay high taxes even as they continue to access social benefits. Hence, the conventional wisdom in Europe is that refugees impose a cost that the rest of society must bear.

For Hansen, however, that financial reckoning is wrong because it focuses too much on the refugee as “benefit recipient” and on the rest of society as a sort of aggregate “taxpayer”.