Seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country takes in too many immigrants(english.elpais.com) |
Seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country takes in too many immigrants(english.elpais.com) |
Populations are shrinking and to keep the economy in a healthy place, money needs to come from somewhere. The easiest solution is to add bodies via immigration. Otherwise taxes need to go up or governments need to spend money incentivizing people to start families, which will also probably necessitate an increase in taxes.
I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago and it's clear to me that the status quo will slowly degrade society eventually. Maybe not in my lifetime and perhaps not in the lifetimes of my future children, but not doing anything is also a decision.
I think if a country decides that it wants to go down one path that essentially leads to a "natural end" that should be their right as a democratic society, but don't try and hide your nations intentions behind flowery language about inclusivity and diversity. If some ideals are so important to the culture, then I think these nations need to be honest and start codifying more aspects of their desired culture into law or start investing heavily in social programs to foster that longing culture.
Please, I absolutely want to here some of your ideas on all sides of this issue! Right now I'm just an immigrant sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how this all shakes out.
We do have a very good safety net, so immigrants who don't contribute does not help the economy, they can be really expensive. In some extreme cases some get 100K+ USD in support yearly because they don't work, and that is when NOK is much weaker than it usually is.
Most of the money Norway spend on financial social assistance is on immigrants, even though they make up less than 20 % of the population. Depending on where immigration is from, the general economic benefit might be very negative or positive.
Generally I do think that someone who moves to another country should do what they can to become a part of society.
I'm the child of immigrants and still have family in the old country, and my family decided to move to the US over Western Europe or Singapore specifically because the opportunities are greater and Americans are way more open-minded about immigrants mixing their home culture with their adopted culture.
At the end of the day, European countries will have to make the choice about whether they want to remain monoethnic entities (which itself was a result of ethnic cleansing during and after WW2) or whether they are open to a multicultural identity.
There's no point for skilled immigrants to go to Europe if they have the opportunity or pathway to PR or Citizenship in North America as salaries are higher, opportunities are greater, and the population is way less xenophobic (p.s. r/Canada is NOT representative of Canadians - and I lived in parts of BC where the Reform Party was extremely popular back in the day)
Most immigrants that you use for your archetype in Norway end up being refugees, and are themselves not representative of most immigrants even within Norway.
And I do have extended family in Scandanavia, and honestly, it sucks there from a xenophobia perspective, which pushed them to move to North America a couple years ago.
Also, those immigrants you are derisive about have kids who end up doing very well. Look at how overrepresented 2nd Gen Pakistani Norwegians are in Medicine and Law despite their parents working lower class jobs like janitorial work or taxi driving.
Thus won't happen and it is impossible for it to happen.
So immigration is just kicking the can down the road (with heavy societal cost) instead of facing the challenge head-on. That challenge is to accept that population will stop growing and even decrease and to adapt.
For instance, technology allows and will allow to automate many jobs.
Personally, I think we have quite a long way to go before we reach a point where that cannot ever be true and I think we should account for the possibility that humanity finds a way to keep expanding forever. Whether that be into the ocean or outer space or perhaps ever vertically on Earth. But those are problems for a thousand years from now and I don't think are as worthy of consideration in 2024.
What sort of other challenges do you see that need to be addressed first and foremost?
Japan will be the first place where we will see this playing out. I think this will be one of the biggest social experiments of our lifetimes.
I do not know how it can be done, but I do not see another way without huge productivity gains via technology to have some sort of support for an aging/dying population.
I think governments could do a bit more by making more fine-grained choices. Of course that's easily targeted by political opposition as xenophobia. Such a system could be also abused.
You talk about Netherlands and you not seeing that collapse in your lifetime. I see Spain. Here police and justice don't work that well and there is a feeling of impunity. I can see Spanish culture collapsing much faster.
Governments can try but it comes down to whether immigrants want to immigrate to those countries.
I'm the child of immigrants, and my family decided to move to the US over Western Europe or Singapore specifically because the opportunities are greater and Americans are way more open-minded about immigrants mixing their home culture with their adopted culture.
At the end of the day, European countries will have to make the choice about whether they want to remain monoethnic entities (which itself was a result of ethnic cleansed during and after WW2) or whether they are open to a multicultural identity.
There's no point for skilled immigrants to go to Europe if they have the opportunity or pathway to PR or Citizenship in North America as salaries are higher, opportunities are greater, and the population is way less xenophobic (p.s. r/Canada is NOT representative of Canadians - and I lived in parts of BC where the Reform Party was extremely popular back in the day)
Why would a Mexican SWE want to move to Spain in order to earn peanuts and get called a "Sudaca" when they can earn a higher salary in El Paso or Dallas and still be a couple hours from home.
Ime, the personal ranking of countries for Asian immigrants (South, East, and Southeast) is as follows:
Tier 1 - US, Canada (backdoor to US via TN)
Tier 2 - UK, Australia, NZ, SG, Ireland, HK (before NSL)
Tier 3 - Rest of Western Europe
Tier 4 - East Asia, the Gulf, Malaysia
Most European countries are simply consolation prizes for immigrants. Plenty of people from my region of South Asia worked in the UK and Italy back in the day, but Canada and the US remains the primary goal.
Most people are not against immigration per se, they are against uncontrolled immigration of undocumented aliens. A legal and orderly immigration process is the way to go for Europe. In fact this route existed for many years but recently it takes a back seat to simply running over the border. Europe need to scale it up and actually allow for more legal immigration.
Do you think it would be helpful for governments to enforce more strict "integration" policies to satisfy the worries of the local population? If I'm not mistaken, Denmark has a much more robust integration process and I tend to see less pushback from Danes about immigrants.
No. Populations are predicted to shrink. The current observed population is still growing.
For any system, absorbing shocks and massive social change will take decades to resolve. "The natural end" I would argue will occur with or without government intervention. In the ideal case, government intervention should lessen the upheaval by preparing for eventual population decline. At worst, government intervention will champion false hare-brained schemes like Brexit or massive immigration. This will only make things worse, not better.
This situation remind of when France's Louis XVI was deeply in debt. Instead of reforming society and their unfair taxation scheme (only the poor paid taxes), France put their trust in Necker a "financial genius". Necker published a completely fake set of accounting books in order to get even more loans. Of course, he argued the loans were only step1 of his plan to get "breathing room". Step2 was to actually reform France. I believe he is disingenuous. As an experienced financier, he should known that loaning money to France is like giving money to a gambling addict. Who is the greater the fool? The gambling addict or the person loaning money to the addict? Meanwhile Louis XVI and his family got their heads chopped off by the French Revolution. With hindsight, he would have better off confiscating all the church property (which the Revolutionaries did) and refused to pay the old debts.
And I do think "how much migration is too much migration?" is a serious question worth asking; there's a big difference if 1%, 10%, and 50% of the population are migrants. It's a shame this topic has been hijacked by right-wing firebrands.
One of the main problems is just housing; you can have long discussions on the cause(s) of that and I don't think migration is the root cause, but at the same time it's hard to deny that migration puts extra pressure on things, especially in the Netherlands with the whole tax discount for migrants. And abstract discussions are all fine, but if people ain't got no place to live in, then well... Long-term plans and discussions don't really resonate if the short term sucks so much.
Somehow the mainstream parties and especially the left have shifted from anti-racism to a blanket and absolute "immigration is good" and "all refugees welcome" consensus (and not only that but in some cases a stance that more diveristy should actually be encouraged) and anyone raising concerns is indeed labelled as "right-wing" or "far-right", which is not helpful at all.
I see the UK/France going for the former option and Poland/Hungary going for the latter. Will be interesting to see how Germany and Sweden decide.
Population cannot grow forever, birth rates are dropping globally, and in fact birds rates are already below replacement rate in most developed countries.
So stagnant or decreasing population will happen, and I think actually should happen considering the global environmental crisis.
This does not imply plateauing economics. We need to start focusing on figures per capita, which means using education and technology to maximise productivity instead of relying on cheap human labour and overall GDP figures. What's important is for people to be better off individually.
Mass immigration is destroying homogeneous nation states in Europe, hence the backlash and hence why Eastern Asian countries do not want to follow down the same path.
I think the best case long term scenario is population stability.
> We need to start focusing on figures per capita
Even per capita figures are distorted by the fact that naturally declining populations imply ageing populations. So even in a technologically improving society where output per worker was increasing, per capita figures could decrease.
To be clear I don't think Japanification is inherently bad - individual quality of life can still improve despite unflattering macroeconomic numbers. But it still involves tradeoffs.
Even nineteenth century France & Imperial Rome under Augustus don't appear to have been successful in raising birthrates, although I can't pretend to have great data for those examples.
I'm the child of immigrants, and my family decided to move to the US over Western Europe or Singapore specifically because the opportunities are greater and Americans are way more open-minded about immigrants mixing their home culture with their adopted culture.
At the end of the day, European countries will have to make the choice about whether they want to remain monoethnic entities (which itself was a result of ethnic cleansing during and after WW2) or whether they are open to a multicultural identity.
There's no point for skilled immigrants to go to Europe if they have the opportunity or pathway to PR or Citizenship in North America as salaries are higher, opportunities are greater, and the population is way less xenophobic (p.s. r/Canada is NOT representative of Canadians - and I lived in parts of BC where the Reform Party was extremely popular back in the day)
Why would a Mexican Engineer want to move to Spain in order to earn peanuts and get called a "Sudaca" when they can earn a higher salary in El Paso or Dallas and still be a couple hours from home.
Ime, the personal ranking of countries for Asian immigrants (South, East, and Southeast) is as follows:
Tier 1 - US, Canada (backdoor to US via TN)
Tier 2 - UK, Australia, NZ, SG, Ireland, HK (before NSL)
Tier 3 - Rest of Western Europe
Tier 4 - East Asia, the Gulf, Malaysia
Most European countries are simply consolation prizes for immigrants. Plenty of people from my region of South Asia worked in the UK and Italy 30-50 years ago, but now prefer Canada and the US instead, or if they're educated staying in India.
Full disclosure, I’m an immigrant myself, I travel a lot for work and stay for prolonged periods.
There are as many reasons to migrate as there are migrants… myself, I would never wish to live in the US but am very happy to live in Switzerland.
Your tier list is completely whack, there is no way I would list the UK above Western Europe. I have spent 18+ months in the UK last five years.
There's lots of noise in Ireland currently due to "tent cities" popping up in Dublin - there's not enough space to accommodate all the asylum seekers that arrive in the city any more. This clearly has a negative impact on everyone's perception of immigration, and the press readily forgets about the immigrants that entered the country through legal channels and are actively contributing to the economy on a daily basis.
Illegal immigration and asylum abuse get the most headlines because that allows the most sensationalist take.
But if you look at the anti-immigration trends in countries like France or the Netherland, or perhaps Germany, they are driven by legal immigration over decades.
I think it's also a mistake to focus on the economy. First because contributing to the economy as a whole does not mean it benefits everyone. For instance, it can keep wages low or lower. Second because when people object to mass immigration they often look at the impact on society and the disappearing local culture and the impact on housing and infrastructure.
The same mistake was made in the UK during the Brexit referendum: the 'remain' side focused on the "economic benefits" of immigration, completely missing the actual concerns of the people.
If you have the skills for above as an immigrant, you can command way better salaries in the US and Canada, or stay in your home country.
There's no reason to immigrate to Western Europe except as a consolation prize.
Edit: Also I want to add that it is way easier to get a permanent residence and citizenship, for example in Germany than the US. The only problem is just learning German but for that most of the companies support you by paying your language course and so on.
My key finding is that the average European sees the EU and their country go down but his personal situation either improved or at least was stable.
https://www.arte.tv/sites/corporate/de/umfrage-concerns-and-...
I think name calling and gaslighting is the biggest problem here because it poisons the whole discourse.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/growing-number-of-canadians-be...
> These are some of the conclusions from a survey carried out online between March 27 and April 9 in the 27 member states, where 22,726 people over 15 years of age were interviewed, with a representative sample from each country. In addition to El PAÍS, the media organizations Gazeta Wyborcza, Internazionale, Ir, Kathimerini, Le Soir and Telex collaborated in the survey.
They even publish the data as well as a detailed presentation detailing number of respondents per country:
https://www.arte.tv/sites/corporate/de/umfrage-concerns-and-...
As said, birth rates are already below replacement rates in developed countries and decreasing everywhere else. Projections are that the global population may stop growing by the end of the century.
The seemingly "easy" option of immigration is causing big societal issues in Europe with a growing backlash against it.
The global environmental crisis is caused by the booming population of the last century or so combined with economic growth.
So this is very much a "now" issue.
They are unofficially bringing in plenty of Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino, Nepali, Thai, and Pakistani immigrants via ill-disguised migrant worker programs that have Gulf level abusive conditions
Same with South Korea and Taiwan.
[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/166/how-do-you-dec...
[0] - https://statisticsbyjim.com/basics/central-limit-theorem/
And by and large it's not like centre- or even left-wing parties are in favour of "all refugees welcome" or "[all] immigration is good". Actually Netherlands has had a broadly right-wing government for about 20 years now, which has generally been against immigration.
And if we look at France, Germany, UK, then the situation is roughly similar (with differences in details and nuance, of course).
If I take the example of the UK: arguably right-wing government for 14 years with grass root Conservative backers against immigration. Well, last year the UK had the highest legal immigration on record.
Considering the popularity of Wilders in the Netherlands perhaps the government did not actually do anything to limit non-EU immigration, either...
If the people feel taken for a ride this cannot end well.
People always talk about integration but that's easy. Assimilation is the harder goal.
This highlights the key, difficult issue with immigration into Europe: people from vastly different cultures and religion who don't assimilate even in some cases at the third generation. But it's very difficult to openly discuss this because anyone who dares say, for example, "there are too many muslim immigrants" is immediately piloried and so the debate is poisoned.
1. Gender equality : probably very high on list of desirable qualities in assimilation
2. Language : may be somewhere in middle
3. Being required to Celebrate Christmas in kindergarten : even lower I say and may be counterproductive
Not all sides of assimilation are same. With Germany, it seems like it's all or nothing though. The debate is poisoned because no one is listening to the other side. One side says, "why should we change?" And other side say, "well, why should we?" And nothing goes anywhere.
Language is a basic requirement for integration, by the way, way before assimilation.
I think your last sentence misses the point that there is no obligation to accept immigrants and that the host country is sovereignly free to accept or reject anyone they wish.
It is as a skilled immigrant like my parents.
A job like a doctor or engineer pays decently well in your home country, so there's no reason to uproot your life unless there is a DRASTIC difference in QoL, because immigrating is expensive. You're looking at $30-50k spent to immigrate.
Germany doesn't provide that drastic enough an economic change compared to the US and Canada, and that's why it's so easy to immigrate to Germany - it isn't as oversubscribed, and those same white collar roles you mentioned end up giving the same if not better benefits in North America via your employer.
For Eastern European or MENA immigrants, Germany makes sense because there is an existing community and it's close to home - not as much for Asians or Central/South Americans.
Furthermore, the xenophobia is real in Germany and across Europe. It's hard to explain to a Gora or Ang Mo, but like you'll never truly become "German" or "French" for a large segment of the population no matter how much you try to assimilate.
> it is way easier to get a permanent residence and citizenship, for example in Germany than the US
Because for a large segment of immigrants (especially from Asia and Central/South America and especially among skilled professionals), Germany and much of Europe simply isn't as attractive a proposition. You end up spending a similar amount immigrating but salaries are much lower and communities aren't as established so it harder to recoup costs
It is not in Turkey but again, it is not about money. People want to move to Western Europe for multiple reasons. I met with a brain surgeon from South Korea who moved to Germany, because he just wanted to live in the centre of the Europe so he can travel around easily.
I'm also telling people to move to the US if they only care money but that's not their priority.
> You're looking at $30-50k spent to immigrate.
I've never heard such a number. You spend around €2-3K and most of the cases, you get a relocation budget from your employer.
Hence why I called out Eastern Europe and MENA, though Turks who can afford it do try to target the US instead.
For example, all of Erdogan's kids attended IU Bloomington for undergrad and grad school instead of German programs like LMU or TUM, and the Koç family (the family that controls the Turkish economy) sent most of their kids to Stanford, JHU, and Brown.
> I met with a brain surgeon from South Korea who moved to Germany, because he just wanted to live in the centre of the Europe so he can travel around easily
Ofc, yet the largest Korean diaspora in the West is in America, and the 2nd largest in Canada.
> you get a relocation budget from your employer.
In tech we're lucky we have a market that pays so highly for our skills, but other industries don't pay as much or require a significant amount of retraining, and if you're bringing a family, as plenty of immigrants do, you don't want to live in crummy neighborhood, so you need a lot of money to have a safety net.
For example, there can be a legal requirement to have a B2 level of German within 3 years of being in country, if the requirement is so important.
Right now, the policies say one thing and politics say another.
P.S. : the real reason such a law would never exist is because it would drive a huge amount of skilled immigration away and this is something also politicians cannot afford.
Hard disagree. The housing / labor markets systems are fundamentally broken and tossing what is effectively scraps at people won't cause them to have a second child in their one bedroom or move 1.5 hours away from their high status job
In a European context, France has much higher fertility than any of the Nordic countries despite higher unemployment and effectively the same housing affordability stats. More internationally the figures in Israel (pre Oct 2023) and Japan also go against the grain.
> child benefits
120-180 EUR a month per child doesn't even cover half the costs of a child.
In Germany antisemitic character traits are reason not to get the citizen ship (which I agree) but the whole woke + pro Palestine crowd was very unpleased about.
That's what at least one version of the test (in Saxony-Anhalt) requires -- except that it happens to apply to a certain other random country (Israel). But hey, if you're a fan of McCarthyist loyalty oaths of this sort, then I suppose this is the kind of thing you like.
It would also make you complicit in a form of antisemitism -- in that it denies the right of Orthodox Jews (some of whom are fundamentally opposed to the current State of Israel because it preempts the coming of the Messiah) to be true to their own views and identity in regard to this matter. BTW this is an opinion based on deeply held religious views, not on any political standpoint per se.
Apparently the yahoos who came up with this law don't feel these people have a right to express their deeply held views in accordance with what they see as Jewish Law. And they certainly don't think such people -- the "wrong kind" of Jews, I guess -- should be welcome in Germany.
You may now thank the "woke crowd" for saving you from this particular form of authoritarian (and antisemitic) nonsense.
"in that it denies the right of Orthodox Jews" a small group of Orthodox Jews, seeing as weirdos among other Jews.
" You may now thank the "woke crowd" for saving you from this particular form of authoritarian (and antisemitic) nonsense. " that does not make any sense.
This was your initial argument and I'm trying to tell you that there are many reasons by pointing out to some examples. Why is it so hard to understand?
There will ofc be people immigrating to Western Europe, and ofc a decent number are skilled, yet at the end of the day, in absolute numbers immigrants trend towards North America over Western Europe, inspite of the difficulty [0].
Immigration, like every product or service follows the law of supply and demand. It is miles easier to immigrate to much of Western Europe simply because the demand, while significant, is not as close to that for North America
If Western European countries wish to attract skilled immigration, they need to understand what truly makes the North American system click.
Australia followed a similar policy after ending the White Australia program in the 1970s and transformed into a truly multicultural country, and that was due to following a program similar to that in North America.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
And this proofs the point that income isnt the only metric for emigration.
Historically that was the default when people had very positive fertility. In Israel & the US where fertility is higher there's even less generous setups than Sweden & Germany.
I suspect if you give people enough money they'll probably start having kids, but it's a very high number. Hungary is currently spending 5% of its GDP on fertility policies with little success [1]. Last year Poland's increase in its child benefit program alone cost 0.7-0.8% of GDP [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-approves-child-b...
If governments were serious about falling birth rates they would invest in their people and give them reasons to have kids rather than saying "f- you" and just importing the workforce from poor countries instead.
btw It is also absolutely personally a net win to invest in a new language or a new culture.
Then why are jobs empty in Germany? It's a net importer, but 30% of people in Germany also leave after living their for some years.
Also, regarding bew language, culture, it can definitely be a net win. But it's always about tradeoff. For someone from an third world country doing their masters, the net win from language might be less than net win from taking advantage of all the education resources available to them now in Europe.
A good engineer without knowledge of local language has a more robust prospects around the world than a bad engineer with local language knowledge.
That's what you're advocating, apparently.
Also on the topic of Antisemitism I " trust " the local Jewish organisations and their opinion more than some stranger on HN.
The local decree is in clear violation of Articles 1 and 5 of the Grundgesetz in any case. Which was specifically designed to prevent bullying of sort.
In particular there's this notion of Meinungsfreiheit ("freedom of thought" essentially) as an explicitly protected right, which you might want to look into.
[0] - https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/7938614756940962...
2. I have literally provided a peer reviewed paper proving my point, and I can provide a second one as well [0].
It's a well documented trend, and I myself can confirm this within my family, and multiple others in a similar boat.
I'm not saying Western Europe is bad, but the kind of pipeline that exists in much of North America isn't as robust in Western Europe.
Plus the absolute number in the trade paper you provided is ~10k arrivals and ~6k departures from Europe, which is a drop in the bucket in absolute terms compared to North America. Just with EB-2s alone (one of the multiple types of visas for STEM talent) you are seeing 90k approvals a year.
[0] - https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-047_b5373e6a-...
> A job like a doctor or engineer pays decently well in your home country, so there's no reason to uproot your life unless there is a DRASTIC difference in QoL
The rate of inflows and outflows of European and American tech workers being constant proves this very point.
Pre-tax TC is only 2-3x more in the US than much of Europe, and QoL doesn't change drastically, so there's no reason for Europeans techies to immigrate to the US or vice versa based on salary alone.
This is a similar story for techies in other markets like China, SK, Taiwan, and India preferring to stay put instead of immigrating to much of Western Europe, because it's a 1-3x TC bump compared to a 3-6x TC bump going to North America.
As tech salaries in those countries rise, then increasingly techies won't leave those countries either unless a drastic TC change is provided.
And it's not just salary, the xenophobia and microaggressions in much of Europe are definitely in your face if you don't look "European" (and even then some idiots will target other Europeans as lesser) compared to much of North America.
And no, pointing out Varadkar, Sunak, and Costa are of South Asian origin; Yeşilgöz and Özdemir being of Turkish origin; etc doesn't fly.
" And it's not just salary, the xenophobia and microaggressions in much of Europe are definitely in your face if you don't look "European" (and even then some idiots will target other Europeans as lesser) compared to much of North America. " Just a casual reminder that 50 % + Americans voted for Trump while many European countries have a way smaller right populist movements. India and China also have very racist governments. And again Europe has an influx of tech workers so I guess, your pointed out factors are not the only ones that matters.
" eşilgöz and Özdemir being of Turkish origin " I'll ask my Turkish friends I meet casually in Berlin.
From my site I learned again. Americans think they are the best country in the world while seing not the problems of their new home.