Migrants may give Europe's economy a new lease of life

London

EUROPE'S ageing economy may just find the biggest refugee crisis since World War Two giving it a new lease of life - even if huge uncertainty about the future scale of immigration and how refugees are integrated cloud any long-range forecasting.

With winter approaching, the dramatic flow into Europe this year of people fleeing poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa slowed only marginally in September.

Some 170,000 "irregular migrants" entered the European Union last month, according to the bloc's border agency Frontex, taking the total for the year so far to 710,000.

That's already almost three times the number for all of 2014 and is widely forecast to top one million by year-end. So…