Moving countries is hard. Not just paperwork hard, but restarting-your-life hard. Credit history, professional networks, understanding how things actually work versus how they officially work.
If the mobility framework makes it meaningfully easier for skilled workers to move between India and Europe, that's significant. Not because of labor economics, but because talented people having more options is generally good for everyone.
The H1B system in the US has created a lot of anxiety and frustration. Competition for that talent pool seems healthy.
Some developed countries have terrible demographics and need fresh kids.
I am expecting that sometime soon New Zealand will start accepting unskilled immigrants if they have >2 healthy kids under 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise me if the dept of internal affairs already has a soft rule to encourage that.
At some point many countries with shitty demographics are going to have to start competing to import kids.
While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else.
It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves.
In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade.
But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.
What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith.
For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
Might we see a European flowering as the US chokes itself into a regional power?
But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary.
EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
Immigration remains under the purview of individual EU member states. And immigration/mobility is out of scope of the actual EU-India FTA deal and the EU-India Defense Pact deal.
Notice how this entire thread got derailed by low karma and newish accounts dogwhistling immigration instead of discussing how the deal expanded European (and India) industrial and chemical exports to India (and Europe) by giving them a tariff rate under that which is Chinese transshipped products via ASEAN get thus making European (and Indian) capital goods cost effective and now includes India as part of ReArm Europe [1] - the EU's defense fund for European and Ukrainian rearmament [2].
Who needs Russian backed farmer disinfo networks [3] when you have anonymous "software engineer" and "OSINT" accounts stirring $hit to try and undermine the EU-India relationship [4]. That said, the deal will go through because the right businesses and unions were mollified over the past 2-3 years building up to this.
[0] - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
[1] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence...
[2] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...
[3] - https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafr...
[4] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
The current challenge is that China has so much industrial overcapacity that it possibly can sell goods at near , sometimes even below mfg costs which makes it difficult if not impossible for India or other country made goods to even think of competing in the middle part of the value chain. Yet, it is the only hope for India to climb at least slightly even if they can never hope to get to the frontier of mfg. Chinese goals now are to amortize their existing mfg investments in any way possible but they still find it difficult to spur domestic consumption
Especially cars, India has had insane tariffs on luxury cars and motorcycles that will disappear, which is interesting. On the face this seems like a good deal for India as India can probably export much more than EU can to India except for a few sectors like Automobiles and Chips, but who knows, I assume EU officials seem to think the gains in a few high tech sectors are enough to offset the cheap goods on all other sectors.
Chinese manufacturers got hounded out and as a result the PRC tried [0] and failed [1] to weaponize the WTO against India [0] for India trying to subsidize GreenTech driven industrialization.
Chinese manufacturers are allowed to enter India, but on terms similar to what the PRC used when Western, Japanese, and Korean players began entering the Chinese market - something which German policymakers even pointed out [2].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-files-wto-case-aga...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-stops-chinas-reque...
[2] - https://table.media/china/thema-des-tages/indien-weshalb-chi...
It's not a coincidence that EU suddenly signs trade deals left and right with the utmost urgency, see the recent Mercosur deal. The coffers are going dry and they need to bring in every euro they can no matter the future societal cost.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but personally I'm skeptical these trade deals will lead to an increase in purchasing power and QoL for the average EU working class citizen in many countries, who've seen a stagnation or even decrease in the last decade or so.
Our bureaucracy and governments has finally learnt how to do a Pareto analysis and learnt the difference between high volume/low margin vs low volume/high margins.
In a cost of living crisis, maybe this is seen as a helpful import?
Did I miss anything?
I don't even understand what "lop-sided" means here.
Would you say that Canada's oil and softwood businesses are lop-sided because we produce and export a lot of it? Or that the groceries' market is lop-sided because we don't produce a lot of it and therefore have to import?
Canada is an importer of people (not only from India) because it can't produce a lot of people. It is not different from groceries.
>It is not different from groceries.
Do you appreciate that, in the wider historical context, this position is an exceptionally radical one? You seem to not understand how there could even exist a difference of opinion on this, but I'm confident that this outlook of humans as being completely fungible, transactional economic units would appear unthinkable to anyone throughout 99% of human history. Just the suggestion that a nation's population should be restocked by swapping it out with another nation's population would be tantamount to treason any time prior to the revolution of the 1960s.
So does every country that can't grow it's population indefinitely need to import a ton of people? What is the endgame there?
And I thought trade in people as some kind of fungible economic token was out of vogue.
[1] https://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl%2F40615%2...
Citation very much needed. This sounds like _your_ concern that you're trying to launder through projecting onto the rest of the country.
It is one of the top 5 issues for ALL Canadians.
Look at this chart for example: https://preview.redd.it/in-the-first-three-months-of-2025-ca...
The previous Trudeau govt? Absolutely not. He was the prime minister of everyone except Canadians.
These are a bit of a legacy thing that countries can't just develop.
India to CH, gold, jewelry, equipment, textiles.
I always thought of Brussels as the city where decisions go to die; that the EU discusses everything, poses for pictures and solves nothing. Then, in less than a month we have the trade deal EU-Mercosur and this one with India.
Maybe the Europeans can actually solve problems, after all.
4.) EU does get things done. Maybe you don't read the news (where do you live?)
It is funny that it took less time for South Americans to create the Mercosur and for the Pacific countries to create the trans-Pacific partnership than to negotiate any trade deals with the EU.
> where do you live?
Latin American living in Canada.
I expect something similar with the India Deal, there is always some form of Veto in the EU that makes it very hard to act as a unit.
This is great news for professionals wishing to move to the EU, and I hope many will use this opportunity.
Does it not commit the member states to for example uncap student visas which are a common route for migration?
Like if the framework would explicitly say "EU to allow in 20 million Indian workers every year" the political backlash would have been devastating, but since the framework only talks in vague phrases like "facilitate labour mobility" and "Enable mobility for skilled workers, young professionals" which are obvious migration policies but disguised in super vague terms to obfuscate the real intent.
That's why they're politicians, that's their job, they need to gaslight you on how policies that only benefit the business/asset owning class is gonna benefit you, the working class, even if that's not true. Their job is to get the voters to buy into and accept the policies their lobbyists push for.
Way to fall-off from being the one source of news everyone in "Anglo" countries in the Third-World used to turn to (and love and respect... however biased the news may have been).
Edit: am trying to access from US, I see a paywall. Good to hear from comments that other countries don't see a paywall.
The BBC will regularly criticise the government, especially when it's a Labour government.
Only the US traffic has a paywall, there's none if you visit it from somewhere else. Understandable to charge people who don't pay for it with their taxes in my opinion, especially if you delivery videos and other expensive content for free without ads.
I would have expected Britain to realize this and continue funding it.
The sad part is that as soon as someone wearing a blue shirt enters office, they will get right in line with whatever the blue shirt says. I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
> I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
Again, you are mistaking Obama for a far-left liberal when he was basically a moderate with no qualms on intervention. Now that we can compare Obama to a populist who claims to be but is not really a conservative either, I don't think we can claim much.
Everyone is just going to move on and ignore the silly tariffs.
You know it's a good deal for the EU and India given that China has been attempting a diplomacy blitz against the deal [0] for [1] years [2] now [3].
Indian DefenseTech and Dual Use technologies vendors can also now participate in ReArm Europe/Readiness2030 [4] (the EU's Defense Modernization fund) as part of the India-EU Defense Pact [5] that was also signed, especially after the French Government identified [6] a Chinese-led disinformation operation against French and Indian DefenseTech which the DGSE reported on with AP [7].
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Edit: Notice how even on HN new accounts are suddenly popping up trying to make a wedge about this deal by dog whistling immigration even though mobility is not mentioned in the draft seen by Reuters and is a power that falls under individual state's sovereignity in the EU.
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Edit 2: Note the subsequent whataboutism that has arisen. A nation trying to conduct disinformation ops against another nation is an offensive action. It's the tip of the iceberg of attempts of foreign interference within France [8]
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Edit 3: Replying here
> I still don't know what 'diplomacy blitz' are you talking about.
The GT is the de facto voice of China's foreign policy, and has consistently viewed the EU-India deal as an attempt to isolate China. Additonally, Table Media (Germany's equivalent of Axios) noted He Lifeng's statements against the EU-India deal dueing Davos 2026, as the EU and India are investigating a compromise on CBAM for Indian exports.
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Edit 4: Unsurprisingly, the entire HN thread has been derailed by immigration.
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[0] - https://table.media/china/thema-des-tages/indien-weshalb-chi...
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1222983.shtml
[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1222993.shtml
[3] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202010/1205230.shtml
[4] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence...
[5] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...
[6] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
[7] - https://apnews.com/article/france-china-pakistan-india-defen...
[8] - https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/07/02/deux-espio...
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
[1] https://www.amazon.fr/Pouvoir-sans-visage-complexe-militaro-...)
The comment is so absurdly out of step that it's clearly just trying to stir the issue.
That should hopefully help increasing the much needed immigration.
Culturally more similar would be South-America I'd say. Them I wouldn't mind at all.
The mass emigration from India is a direct consequence of India's poor wages and living standards. If that was not the case, most people I know (and I myself) wouldn't have emigrated. From what I see[1], the average South American is much better off than the average Indian. Maybe that (and India's huge population) explains why South Americans do not emigrate as much[2] as Indians?
In other words, people from "countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans" may not want to move to Europe. It's all supply and demand at the end of the day
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
Edit: The BBC article is wrong, as can be seen by the draft reported by Reuters [0]
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/details-eu-india-trade-d...
