And those anxious and xenophobic motherfuckers gonna live for sooo much longer than their parents. They easily gonna leech from my salary for the next two decades while I will certainly not get a dime from the generations after me. That generation lived of the wealth of the generations before them AND after them.
And everyone is afraid of immigration. It's bizarre.
and investing in the young
Fuck you I got mine
We are afraid of immigration because there is so few housing that bringing people will just add to the pressure and make rents even more ridiculously expensive . Also, in my country (Portugal), these workers accept working for less and live in miserable conditions (overcrowded homes, tents outside of Lisbon, etc), making it worse for everyone else, causing an exodus of qualified people and a flood of “tourism workers” because salaries just not increase when there are people accepting to work for less.
Meanwhile our public services are collapsing left and right because qualified people just leave and there are so many new people trying to access public healthcare etc.
This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .
I'm from Portugal also and it's not immigration that is driving high rent prices. That's a disingenuous position. Golden visas and Airbnb have contributed MUCH more to this as well as the liberalization of rents coupled with low new housing projects.
The workers that accept low salaries are mostly seasonal workers and they don't compete with locals for decent housing and if you were honest you would mention that most of the time you have plenty of them living in the same space. Again, not occupying a lot of the housing destined for locals. I don't see locals eager to go live in Odemira in the houses occupied by seasonal workers or in Martim Moniz in degraded housing.
Also from Portugal and did you really just say that the problem with immigration is that they get exploited and then everyone ELSE suffers?
I mean i think you see what’s wrong with that.
Also without immigrants Portugal would be completely fucked because all the young people are leaving the country for better jobs in Europe. Someone needs to pick up the slack otherwise it’s just old people and a couple of children.
Also Portugal has a ton of houses. We are above average in houses per capita iirc. We have a problem with salaries and an over dependence on tourism.
I'm not against immigration but it's no solution. You're in Europe. You're trying to replace a workforce that has free education, in a place with high quality education infrastructure, therefore most of them have bachelors and probably at least one or more masters degrees, with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
I've literally had migrant refugees from Lebanon, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco and such as flatmates in Brussels. Some of them are my close friends. They are not remotely prepared to take over 90% of European jobs. You either need social skills, labor skills, language skills or technical skills which they simply do not have. If i was in their shoes, it would take me decades to catch up to how Europeans work.
The migrants come here for what ? Uber eats ? How are they supposed to support themselves ? With government integration money we don't have available ? But say we figure it out and they live and then they will have kids one day. Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the locals. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?
So the issue here isn't that we lack people in Europe. It's that our economic doctrine is deficient. We need to change the doctrine, not the people. Immigration will not solve this problem, it will perpetuate it. Young people not having kids is an economic issue that will still happen whether you have a European young person there or a Iraqi young person there. You can't simply transplant a young couple from a country with very high birth rates in a totally different part of the world, subjected to an entirely different set of circumstances and expect them to be the same in Europe. That's not how this works.
with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
You're talking shit. Immigrants make up 20% of the NHS in the UK, and loads also work in the care sector, those are vital jobs and you have to be literate. Most immigrants I've met speak better English than the local toe rags.
Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the local. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?
The lack of young workers?
You are deliberately talking over them. They’re clearly not claiming that all migrants are illiterate or uneducated or ill-prepared for work in Europe. They’re arguing that many are, and those migrants exacerbate our problems. They certainly don’t solve them.
Aren't western countries have strict education requirements before they would even consider permanent residency applications? Or are you talking about refugees, which imo shouldn't be counted as a way to replenish aging workforce because the governments let them in for humanitarian reason?
most of them have bachelors
Only 30% of people in Europe have bachelors degrees, about the same as the u.s. Thats higher than in developing countries, say India at 8%, but a majority of people in both countries don't have degrees.
It's a common misconception by those with tertiary education in the first world that everyone else has tertiary education because they only talk to people in their social class with tertiary education.
So what I hear you're saying is that education is the solution.
We could educate immigrants, which will take some time. We could also educate the Europeans so they don't take the jobs that requires shorter educations. Either way we will need the immigrants to solve the current demand.
The problem is that the same thing was tried in the 1970s and it didn't turn out well when the demand for low skill workers decreased again. We already know that the demand will drop again in 20-30 years, so we should already now focus on educating the immigrants, so they can function in society after the low skill jobs are gone.
Another thing is that it's not like we can stop immigration. The climate changes will result in massive immigration whether we "allow" it or not. They're not going to sit and die outside imaginary lines on the ground.
IMO, the only realistic option is to accept and start educating immigrants.
Not when you consider that so many are rather old and afraid of change (something which correlates with age).
Many comments below (->above?) about housing. But it seems to me, the problem in much of Europe is that many old people hang on to large half-empty family houses, so over 65s are occupying a lot more space than under 15s (although the latter have more energy, need space to play ...). It's a pity they blame immigrants for this.
The old folks had a good time. Younger generation can't afford sht.
And now they've spent all their money just in time to rely on social security from the young ones. Try and screw us from every angle. Most selfish and greedy generation that existed.
Yeah... That's not where the money went. Some of it, sure. But some very few people have hoarded a lot more than it seems people realise.
Scary though they will be making the rules for a long time to come yet
If only society was designed around looking after people instead of infinite competition, maybe this wouldn't be so much of a problem
2023 is the hottest year ever in record. Everything suggests that it won't hold that record for long. Why would I bring children to this world to suffer the hell that 2050 will be?
Because at least you are thinking about such problems (unlike too many). I thought similarly back in 1998, many records broken since, we're still here, now glad my children are too and getting educated, to help society get through this. By the way the original post is from Ireland which may not get so much warmer (depends thermohaline circulation...) - maybe stormier, although much (not all) of europe will still be nice to live in 2050, adaptation may include many people relocating.
And that's why conservatives get elected. And since more and more young vote for right-wing parties we're in for a real shitshow.
Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.
Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany's case, nuclear energy.
I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.
Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.
We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.
And it's this exact problem that will get solved with the immigration from climate change. Europe is going to get more African migrants fleeing climate change.
Yes, this seems inevitable, and given Europe's relative historical contribution to climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to welcome some, as (to some extent) their right, not charity. An issue, however, is that immigrants tend to gather in crowded hot cities near sea-level, just the places we should plan to slowly depopulate, while it's rarer to see African faces in sparsely populated upland rural areas, where there are more empty houses and older people needing services. Research about climate migration focused mainly on where people will move from, not enough about where it would make most sense for them to move to.
A massive investment in adult education would probably help a lot in making up for the Economic problems of importing tons of people without the level of formal education necessary for the higher value added jobs most europeans can do (50% of the population being Uber and food delivery drivers doesn't quite work economically), but the very same people who brought us a massive house price bubble to reward rent-seekers to the max (in turn feeding a fall in birth rates because young people can't afford a family), a race to the bottom on taxing wealth and 4 decades of falling real terms funding for any public services other than the ones mainly used by old people, are hardly going to invest in adult education.
Well, realistically this is a situation we can fuck our way out of
Having sex is easy. Being able to balance childcare and afford raising children is a feat that grows ever more difficult by the day
It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.
Geez, feels like just this year that over 64 year olds outnumbered under 14 year olds.
My immediate response is that this is clearly good news - a gradual reduction in population is a good thing. We just need to work on managing the societal practicalities properly
Reductions in population will happen after the climate change issues go unresolved when they needed to be, and resource scarcity forces an economic global crisis never seen in modern history. It won’t be gradual. Every pop model predicts going from 10B to 1B in less than 100 years post vertex. Or at least it seems if we stay on the track we are on.
We're so utterly fucked...
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