Hacker News Reader

Comment by iraqmtpizza | Hacker News Reader

Skills shortage means "We could make so much more money if skilled labor was cheaper. Our countrymen are so greedy. Can we please undercut them by importing more desperate and compliant people? Can we get some taxpayer spending to push more young people into this field with the promise of low pay and low job security by claiming there is a shortage? Can you tell them that they will be in high demand and well-respected?"

PhDs get paid nothing and yet there's been a "shortage" for half a century.

View on HN

This is happening in Germany at the moment. The government will dramatically lower the work immigration requirements to compensate for a labour shortage and find new tax payers at a discount.

As a work immigrant myself I can't complain, but it's hard to ignore the cold calculation behind it. We're meant to be cheap labour that shows up pre-trained, and leaves before they get old.

You are basically meant to prop up the pension ponzi-scheme because they are running out of payers and the amount the boomers paid was quite little relative to now

>You are basically meant to prop up the pension ponzi-scheme

Also the housing Ponzi scheme. Germany says they're desperate for workers but actually is lacking the housing for them and puts no real effort in building more because it has Co2 caps in places (lol).

You got a new job in Berlin? Great, now good luck finding an apartment. Germany housing prices are completely out of whack. Munich land prices are similar to SF but wages are 1/3 those in the Bay.

So yeah, you're just cannon fodder for the German economy. Great time to be an employer or landlord in Germany though.

Germany also does a piss poor job of showing that it actually wants immigrants. The Berlin immigration office is a disgrace. German bureaucracy is downright hostile. Oh and now they literally stopped accepting citizenship applications in Berlin.

I know that it's not personal - the system is broken for Germans too - but it diminishes my feeling of belonging. I accept this relationship as transactional.

> Germany also does a piss poor job of showing that it actually wants immigrants

That's because it really doesn't. Businesses and parts of the government probably do, but public opinion is definitely divided on the issue. Germany as a country was founded less than 200 years ago as a nation-state, that is a to say, a country bound by common ancestry and language. The idea that a country like this (or any European country founded the Westphalian system) was just going to turn into a "melting pot" pro immigration state in just a few decades has always struck me as foolish.

The problem is that modern life destroys fertility rates, everywhere from the USA to South Korea the pattern is the same. But the economic systems, particularly pensions and retirement systems, are built around the fundamental assumption that, at the very least, there is a large enough working-age population to support retirees.

So to keep the system going you either need to increase birth rates (which is quite hard, Germany pays you £200 per month per kid and still has abysmal TFR) or increase immigration.

Using immigration to try to solve this issue is either a band-aid solution or a form of population planning "technical debt".

Because if you effectively integrate immigrants, they behave almost exactly like your existing population, including not having enough kids to sustain a workforce and then you're back at square one, needing to either solve the fertility rate issue or increase immigration.

On the other hand, if you fail to effectively integrate immigrants, you run the risk of them forming parallel societies, where even second and third generation individuals from these groups don't feel any attachment or loyalty to the host country, don't properly learn the local language, reject the local culture in favor of their heritage culture, and so on. The problems associated with this become their own issues that the country needs to deal with in addition to the population problems.

So yeah, the entire system is sick, beyond Germany as well. So your take of: > I accept this relationship as transactional. Is probably the right one to have.

>Germany also does a piss poor job of showing that it actually wants immigrants.

Germany doesn't want immigrants, the business owners do, because they need labor.

Then German consumers should want immigrants as well, if they want the products created by said businesses, no?

Who said there are no immigrants? Every new year is a record immigration year. Also for housing prices.

The whole "we need even more immigrants" is wage suppression propaganda. Many of the big German business crying wolf have had record sales, only beeing kneecapped by the disappearance of cheap Russian gas and are trying to compensate it with cheaper labor.

> The whole "we need even more immigrants" is wage suppression propaganda.

No, it's required to keep the pension scheme solvent.

And also to keep the low prices of German products which keeps German businesses competitive and thus Germans employed, taxes paid, etc.

You're making the race to the bottom manufacturing sound like an advantage Germany should aspire to. You have it backwards.

I think German themselves made that race to the bottom when they selected cheap Russian gas as their main competitive advantage - as you very well noticed.

Do you think German manufacturing can compete with Chinese one once salaries grow?

No, but is wage dumping the long term solution? Or is that bandaid on a arterial bleed?

You're describing a Ponzi scheme. Maybe the Pension pot shouldn't be dependent on quantity of people and more on amount they put in.

I don't know for Germany, but you'll usually have option to receive your pension from abroad, or have it dumped in a local account for later, or transfered to your permanent residency country.

It's always a PITA with no straightforward way, but if you paid for 20 years you'll probably be motivated to go through the hoops to see that money back in some form.

And if you don't qualify, you can get your pension payments refunded (but not your employer's share). If you left Germany, you definitely ought to do it.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund

Comments like this miss the point.

Literally every "shortage" regarding any good in the world follows the same pattern you described which is "well it is a just a shortage at this low of a price. If price increases then there wouldn't be a shortage!"

So you describing literally every shortage ever for any good, but doing it in this weird moralizing way isnt particularly useful.

There are no 50-plus-year skill shortages in market economies. The point is that there is lying going on. Which is not surprising, but that doesn't mean it's not the primary problem or that it somehow goes without saying. It needs to be said early and often.

If you redefine shortage to mean literally anything that people wish was cheaper, then it becomes entirely detached from reality and economics. But if you think it's the appropriate definition, then let's make sure everyone is on the same page. We don't want half the population thinking that shortage means something acute, negative, and resolvable.

It means not being able to find available people with the needed skills. Typically this results from locking talent into exclusive arrangements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com