The French are known for their fierce pride in their heritage. Their dismay and grief at the sight of the fire-ravaged town hall of Limoges are understandable. The 143-year-old landmark in central France had survived two world wars, only to fall victim to rioters.
The anger sweeping Europe’s streets reaches far beyond France. In Italy, demonstrations over living costs and public services have turned violent. In Spain and Portugal, housing has become a rallying cry. Belgian students are resisting rising education costs and proposed reforms.
These upheavals are reaching some of the world’s wealthiest societies, where generations have grown up expecting economic advancement and dependable public services. The struggle to afford the essentials has become an indictment of prosperity that looks more convincing in national accounts than at the kitchen table.
For many young Europeans, the promise of progress is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the price of groceries, a place to live or an education. The question is no longer simply whether they can live better than their parents. It is whether they can afford to begin an independent life.
The figures give that frustration substance. Portuguese house prices rose 180 percent between 2015 and the fourth quarter of 2025, nearly tripling in a decade, according to Eurostat. Across the European Union, the squeeze continued into the second quarter of this year, with purchase prices rising 4.7 percent and rents 3 percent from a year earlier.
Younger people bear a disproportionate burden. In 2025, 26.9 percent of EU residents aged 15 to 29 lived in overcrowded households, compared with 16.8 percent of the population overall. The generational divide is measurable in something as basic as space to live.
Pay packets tell another part of the story. At the beginning of 2025, Italian real wages remained 7.5 percent below their early-2021 level, the OECD found. Years of work had failed to restore the purchasing power eroded by inflation.
No set of figures can explain every protest, still less excuse the violence. But these numbers help explain why official assurances of economic resilience meet with disbelief. Slower inflation does not reverse the price increases households have already absorbed. Growth offers little consolation to a young tenant whose rent consumes every pay rise.
Burning shops, schools and public buildings compounds the injury. The people whose livelihoods are destroyed deserve protection and redress, and those responsible must be held accountable. Yet a government that treats an affordability crisis solely as a policing problem leaves the source of discontent untouched.
For Asia, South Korea included, the first European lesson is that national prosperity must offer ordinary people a credible prospect of security. The second is that economic insecurity becomes harder to manage when governments neglect the work of integrating increasingly diverse societies.
On Jan. 1, 2025, the EU was home to 46.7 million residents born outside the bloc, accounting for 10.4 percent of its population and an increase of 1.9 million from a year earlier. A further 18 million residents had been born in another EU member country. Together, these groups amounted to about 64.7 million foreign-born residents, roughly one in seven people in the union.
These Eurostat figures encompass long-settled residents and naturalized citizens as well as more recent arrivals. They cannot be read as a tally of refugees or people without legal status. A serious immigration debate must begin by knowing whom it is discussing.
Nor is settlement evenly distributed. Germany, France, Spain and Italy together accounted for 66.7 percent of the EU’s foreign-born population, compared with 57.8 percent of its population overall.
The responsibilities of integration are borne in particular countries, towns and neighbourhoods, not in the abstraction of a European average. The figures establish the scale of that responsibility. They do not establish that immigration caused the unrest.
Newcomers need homes, school places and healthcare. They also earn wages, pay taxes and help provide the services on which ageing societies depend. Whether migration strengthens a community depends partly on how effectively governments match recruitment with investment and settlement with opportunity.
When housing and public services fail to keep pace with demand, frustration can find an ethnic target. When employers exploit migrants’ precarious status to depress pay or evade workplace standards, resentment can spread among local workers. Scapegoating foreigners leaves those failures intact. Dismissing every concern about wages, rents or school capacity is equally evasive.
South Korea and Japan have an urgent interest in getting this right. For societies losing working-age people, sustained immigration is becoming an economic necessity.
South Korea’s 2022-based government projections envisage a decline of 3.32 million people aged 15 to 64 in the decade to 2032. By 2072, that population is projected to shrink to 16.58 million from 36.74 million in 2022. Projections are not destiny, but the scale of the anticipated contraction makes waiting for a birthrate recovery an inadequate strategy.
Japan offers a more immediate illustration. Its Statistics Bureau estimated that the Japanese-national population fell by 860,000 in the year to April 2026, while the foreign-national population rose by 301,000. The total population still declined by 559,000. Foreign residents were already cushioning a contraction they could not fully offset.
Automation, fuller participation by women and longer working lives can all help. Immigration must be part of the response. Even a sustained recovery in births would take roughly two decades to replenish the workforce.
But recruiting abroad while neglecting the conditions of everyday life risks reproducing the insecurity governments hope to overcome. Korea cannot ask young people to form families and foreigners to put down roots while leaving both struggling to secure housing, education and stable work.
The OECD has linked Korea’s difficulties in family formation to high housing and education costs, the divide between secure and precarious employment, and the career penalties of motherhood. Addressing those obstacles would improve the prospects of existing residents and newcomers alike.
Immigration policy must therefore reach beyond visa quotas and labor shortages. Funding for local services should reflect settlement needs. Housing must be accessible to jobs. Schools need the staff and language support to help children participate fully. Adults need opportunities to learn the language, put their qualifications to use and build a durable future.
Rights belong at the foundation of that policy. Fair pay, safe workplaces, protection against discrimination and remedies for abuse cannot depend on a worker’s nationality or political popularity. Giving migrants a realistic means of leaving abusive employers and enforcing common labor standards also protect local workers from unfair competition.
Public engagement must have substance. Residents deserve clear answers about whether their communities have the homes, classrooms and services to accommodate growth. Migrants deserve a voice in decisions affecting their lives. Governments should make commitments that can be measured against budgets, deadlines and results.
The same respect for rights must govern the response to unrest. Prosecute violence on the evidence against individuals while protecting peaceful assembly, free expression and due process. A state weakens its claim to legitimacy when it treats lawful dissent as a threat to be suppressed.
Europe’s upheaval warns how economic insecurity can deepen distrust and turn neighbors against one another. South Korea and Japan should heed that warning while they still have room to shape the societies they are becoming.
A country cannot ask young people to have children, invite immigrants to build its future and then price both out of that future.
It's the living costs, stupid.
*The author is the managing editor of AJP.
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