Europe Is Entering a Death Spiral: How Immigrants Can Save It | Hacker News Reader

Europe Is Entering a Death Spiral: How Immigrants Can Save It

maxdesalle.com

17 pointsmaxdesalle35 comments

It always shocks me that the first proposed solution is to import young people from somewhere else rather than encourage existing citizens to have kids.

Actually... I take that back. It's not shocking at all. Immigrants are free and subsidizing childcare is expensive.

It’s also the delay loop. If today I magically encourage people to have children, it’s 19 years until they hit 18, and probably another 5 until they are on average net productive. Also change doesn’t happen that quickly, so really a concerted effort today will maybe pay off in 25 years time.

Fair enough, but a sensible thing would be to do both.

Fully agree with you.

But unfortunately, it takes a whole generation before childcare measures pay off.

From an American perspective, I have always thought of it in terms of votes. Those are future voters, especially for the party that encourage them to immigrate.

The idea that immigrants can resolve this situation is no different from thinking that a pyramid schemes problems can be fixed by adding more people to the pyramid.

It's just not true, and will only make the situation worse.

There is only one way to fix that issue, but unfortunately telling millions of people that the social security system is over and that they need to sort themselves out isn't something that gets people elected.

It's a whole lot easier to simply push out the problem by adding more people to the scam than it is to bite the bullet and stop worsening the situation.

> There is only one way to fix that issue, but unfortunately telling millions of people that the social security system is over and that they need to sort themselves out isn't something that gets people elected.

That is essentially what we want to fix. What you are proposing is accepting failure, and not a solution.

It is true that the pension system will not be stable for long, but this is not a solution. It could prolong failure for a while until the problem repeats.

Also the question is what kind of immigrants. Someone without a good education coming to Europe even at the young age of 25 years will have a very difficult time and might even worsen the problem in social security. Europe needs highly qualified workers.

Europe cannot need only highly skilled workers. It's both questionable by fact, and bad economics. In fact Europe has an insatiable desire for all grades of workers, low and high skilled. And there is no harm in recruiting low skilled workers. It's win-win.

It won't worsen the problem. If you want an example, look to your neighbour Britain which desperately lacks lorry drivers, cleaners, fruit pickers and care home staff. This is why they are seeking to recruit nonEU labour: they can't admit they got freedom of movement wrong. (British people don't want to do these jobs)

British people don´t want to be lorry drivers for minimum wage, this is true.

You are not mentioning the elephant in the room, the unwillingness for many companies to pay anything more than poverty level wages.

> You are not mentioning the elephant in the room, the unwillingness for many companies to pay anything more than poverty level wages.

You got a second layer on that. The unwillingness to not buy from the lowest bidder.

It's brutal from both sides, consumers are extremely price sensitive and will price out living wages for workers in favor of cheap goods. A transparent example of this is airline tickets, where creature comforts have been progressively traded for cheaper fares.

Record profits seem to occur when there is some monopoly power or other situation that allows companies to keep prices high while still forcing down costs. I think the book "Rentier Capitalism: who owns the economy and who pays for it" does a great job of describing the situation. As a bonus it focuses on the UK.

My opinion is that Europe needs Federalization and Deregularization to remain globally competitive. There is plenty of room for growth (which actually tends to be fueled by immigrants) if the molasses can somehow be dissolved. Doing business in Europe is a royal PITA (imho).

They would also do it for convenience. Look at how much surveillance we put on delivery workers, just because people are overwhelmed with reasonably managing their lives. Nobody informed will want to do this job, it has been completely perverted by "optimization". I would not wish that job on my worst enemy.

The same you be said about public officials and Twitter. You have to be really ambitious to ward off and defend sensible policy against people on the mental level of teenagers.

I don't think Europe needs any of the suggestions because I don't see how this is connected to the problem. The rooms for growth are in the developing countries and they do grow. At least partially.

I am not mentioning it. I can't think of any Western democracy who pays these people well, I don't see it as fundamentally undermining the point.

Of course they should be better paid. I hold a belief kindergarten teachers should be paid more than high school teachers, or at least as much.

If we want to die of lack of sanitation, not paying people to clean up is a good way of getting there faster. And so on: these low pay jobs are anything but unimportant: they're just jobs we don't seem willing (societally) to pay for or do, hence persisting underemployment by less educated and demotivated working classes in europe: intergenerational unemployment is a trap.

Market mechanisms attract people from poorer countries to do the work for cheap, depressing the wages in the relevant sectors.

Employers, and people in jobs that are currently safe benefit from that (cheap food, cheap construction, cheap service) and therefore "hold beliefs" over how things should be, or why society strangely just doesn't seem willing to pay more...

It undermines your point on a technicality, there are more than enough qualified lorry drivers in the UK (by the numbers), they just cannot survive on the wages being offered.

Other than that I think we are in agreement.

Lorry drivers in Britain earn substantially better than minimum wage.

Back of the envelope says about £20/hr for an experienced driver. Minimum wage is 8.91 and going up to 9.50 , so HGV driver is about 2x that.

Maybe that’s still too low but far off minimum. Also consider that tax is progressive and you don’t pay much tax on this level of earnings.

Even lorry drivers and especially care demands a lot from you if you come to a new country. You have to learn a lot, not only the language and how things are done in your new home. These are high demands, even if you think the occupation is easy.

Field workers are mostly part-time immigrants in most countries as the work is seasonal. Many that come will return home in winter or will need another occupation. What I want to say is that demands on the labour market are high.

Countries that regarded your suggestions don't have a good looking economy either. Where is this magically economy that imports immigrants in large numbers?

You will just make more jobs untenable by the normal population and it will only get worse, because it will suppress wages further so that no native workers with any prospects will want to work there. This already happened with many jobs, you might want to make sure that this doesn't extend to more industries.

The "insatiable desire" for low skilled workers is coming from corporate interests to keep wages low and workers unorganized. We now have a precarious underclass working with no job security and little integration in society, right here in Germany where we had extremely strong worker rights just a few decades ago. Many regular jobs that used to be steady and good to raise a family with are now low paid and temporary. Super convenient and "win-win" for the 'haves' so we look away, as we want a human on a bike to bring us our burrito. If you look closer you see the guy getting 13€ for cleaning the nasty meat factory floors, laid off periodically to skirt labour laws.

This also means that poorer countries in the EU can't be competitive through price as we have our own low-cost sector. Lose-lose really.

We are also on the verge of many automation breakthroughs that will make many low skilled jobs obsolete, and at the same time huge challenges that can only solved by highly skilled people.

Europe needs less working hours, more subsidies and a smaller standard deviation / higher mean for salaries. Denmark is doing just that, and the birth rates are just fine.

Also, I should point out that the author is 19 years old. I hope he is an exception, but my views at 19 for complex geopolitical issues were simply rubbish

Agreed, at least for western and northern European countries. The strategy for the others may look differently.

The birth rate for Denmark isn't fine.

If you look at the World Bank numbers (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...), the birth rate is at 1.7 children per woman. This means the population is actively declining.

Generally, any birth rate below 2.1 means population decline (without taking immigration into account).

Birth rates in Sweden aren't just fine. Birth rates have plummeted consistently everywhere women have entered the workforce and discovered birth control.

After this no country has found a solution to the below replacement birth rate, despite all being aware of the problems that will come with it.

Besides stating them, can you provide a rationale why your proposals would be a solution, and why no country has successfully arrived to the same conclusions as you and implemented them?

Seems like pouring fuel on fire.

What is causing this so called death spiral is in part mass, uncontrolled immigration by immigrants who often refuse to learn the local language and participate in the country's culture. Driving up the cultural divide and putting a heavy pressure on an already stressed social system.

I think it's actually the governments who did a bad job at integrating these immigrants.

A distinction also needs to be made between immigrants, and refugees. A lot of people directly associate immigrants with refugees, which doesn't necessarily need to be the case.

There is no worker shortage. Otherwise wages would be increasing at a faster rate than inflation which is clearly not the case.

Immigrants will destroy Europe by turining it into a generic settlement area. Nobody needs that and nobody wants that except the enemies of the European people.

I agree with the diagnosis but is immigration the only possible solution?

I can think of at least 2 others straight away, but it seems for some reason governments refuse to entertain any other solutions.

What other solutions do you have in mind? Demography is destiny.

The title alone makes me laugh.

In the past I tried to immigrate to Canada, so I have first hand experience with the ludicrous process.

I was 28 years old and hold a CS degree, had 6 years experience in the field, was actively employed remotely by a company in my European native nation that has a dual tax agreement with Canada (so willing to pay taxes there and could show I would be able to sustain my self). I also took the language proficiency tests that were required and passed with flying colours.

I tried for a year and a half, but then just gave up and went back to Europe.

Just as an example of how bad the system is/was (this was back in '15) I would have received the points I needed (they ran a point system where each aspect of the person gives them certain number of points, placing them on a scale indicating their desirability) if I had taken a job with a corner grocery store in my neighborhood. And then held that job for up to a year.

It is/was a bonkers system.

So Canada's is in no way a system to model anything by. A society does not just run on PhDs.

Ifor the record I am completely for immigration, for people who have no education and up to PhDs. I am pro free flow of goods and people in Schengen. I am not for completely open boarders though.

High-end high-skill migration, accompanied proportionally by capital investment by government, is known to be beneficial.

The EU doesn’t seem to meet these conditions well, though.

Europe is a Ponzi scheme where by immigrants are pulled in en mass ever decade to provide fresh liquidity while the generational members of the country enjoy themselves and add zero value.

Unfortunately new immigrants have cottoned onto this and don't play the game that has been setup for them. They run their own separate economies and send most of their untaxed money back home.

For that reason, Europe is a terminal patient.

>>The extreme right is currently gaining a lot of grounds in Western countries. Marine Le Pen received 1/3 of the votes during France's presidential election in 2017. Donald Trump became president in the US.

I stopped reading already at this introductory sentence.

Why painting the other side as extremists? Macron won 66% and LePen 33%.

One side says the other side is communist; the other side says extremist are gaining ground (as if they shouldn’t exist at all).

TBF things like extreme xenophobia, gun toting goons/citizens, anti-abortion mobs etc. do look extreme to me. Trump supporters / American evangelicals are like a mini-taliban.

Edit: I don't live in the US. Take this as an outsider's perspective.

So is Max a Jew? He shills mass immigration and Israel.

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