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 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...
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.
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.
> 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-...
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.
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-...
